


life will lay you down (as the lightning has lately done)

by Figure_of_Dismay



Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Insomnia, Lizzington - Freeform, Non-Chronological, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-05
Updated: 2015-01-05
Packaged: 2018-01-18 06:31:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 91,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1418448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Figure_of_Dismay/pseuds/Figure_of_Dismay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An intense exploration of love and loss and obsession and Liz's psyche, centering around the events of the Garrick incursion and thereafter. Red/Liz pairing. AU semi-canon compliant. At times it seemed as though her life moved according to certain prohibitions on looking, as though she were in some strange and senseless fairytale. It started with the boxes, it unraveled from there. "and down and deeper, stoke, without sound, the blameless flames, you endless sleeper..."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. what you anointed in pointing your gun there

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Note: this is the first part of (I'm guessing) 3 or 4 parts in this story. I've had some of these ideas floating around in my head for a while, and I wanted to revive an old style of mine, which is completely different than that in Decline and Fall (which I am still working on I promise). I'm already working on the rest of this story. I hope to have the next chapter up within a week or so.
> 
> This fic is AU but semi-canon compliant, and will have spoilers for 1.09/1.10 Anslo Garrick onward, in time. This fic includes and focuses on Red/Liz pairing, and expect it to be more evident here than in my other story!
> 
> None of the characters you recognize are mine, nor is the Blacklist world. No infringement intended. Written purely for entertainment purposes.

Life Will Lay You Down (as the lightning has lately done)

_are you mine?_  
 _my heart?_  
 _mine anymore?_

_stay with me for awhile,_  
 _that's an awfully real gun._  
 _I know life will lay you down,_  
 _as the lightning has lately done._

_failing this, failing this_  
 _follow me, my sweetest friend,_  
 _to see what you anointed in pointing your gun there._  
\-- Only Skin, Joanna Newsom

**

There were boxes. There were a lot of boxes. It started because Tom told her he needed the boxes out of the living room because the parent group from the class play was going to be coming over that friday night. She hadn’t touched them since they arrived by truck as packed up and sent by her Aunt Judy, but she hadn’t forgotten about them, or what they represented -- an impossible project, and terrible loss, a reality she didn’t want to face. She’d begun to feel like the boxes were lying in wait. 

First she moved them, one at a time, up the stairs to the room that had once been her office, and then partially made over into a nursery before that too had been dismantled. She stacked up the boxes into a maze between the door and her abandoned desk. She meant to leave them like that, dead and contained in the room at the end of the hall, where they couldn’t assail her with pangs of loss, and obligation. 

Red had been away for two weeks. He had called her once, on a staticy line and she had clutched at her phone and leaned into his voice, straining for every nuance, half sure the line was being tapped, half sure he was saying goodbye to her, that he had made the mistake of nearly sacrificing himself for her once and meant never to see her again.

“Where are you,” she shot at him, rapid fire and alarmingly shrill, “Are you hurt? Are you safe? They’re looking for you, I need to know what to tell them.” She meant, _don’t you know how desperate I was to find you, don’t you know how hard I tried?_

“Tell them the truth, Lizzy,” he told her, sounding distant and tired and strained, “I’m going to be away, for a while. You will be protected, you will be cared for, I want you to know that, and if you need me, I will find a way to you, but I won’t be able to… be here for a time, do you understand?” 

“No, Red, I don’t understand, Garrick’s dead, there’s going to be an investigation, we’ll find the mole -- it’ll all be cleared up soon, you’ll see.” 

“I need you to be careful of your husband, I know you don’t believe me, but you owe me that much, at least,” he told her, ignoring her protests, “Keep a weather eye. I’ll contact you again when the way is clear.”

“Wait,” she had called, feeling a desperation like somewhere a clock was ticking down, “How do i contact you if I need to get you a message?” _How do i know you won’t just disappear off the face of the earth?_

“I believe you know the avenues open to you,” he’d said, and the line had gone quiet then, but he hadn’t hung up, they just listened to each other breathe for a long stretch of seconds until finally he’d said, “You’ll be alright, Lizzy. After all I did a much better job keeping you safe from afar than I have from close by.”

And she hadn’t been able to form a response that encompassed the fact that he had kept her safe in the most ludicrously reckless way, and that she’d kept herself safe all these years, he could hardly take the credit and her outrage that he was vanishing just as suddenly and violently as he’d arrived -- and the line had gone dead. 

She’d kept the phone in her pocket the rest of the day, curling her fingers around it from time to time. And when Tom had tried to talk to her again about moving, she had shouted at him, wildly and incoherently, but thankfully briefly. She retreated to a scalding, scented bath, with a firmly locked door between her and the rest of the world, where she sat curled over her knees in the hot water, trying to figure out how to breath against the vice around her ribs, pressing her hands over and over again to her dry eyes.

**

Tom didn’t let the idea of moving go. She’d go into work have to give statements, and be interviewed while hooked up to a polygraph, talk about Red, and the incursion, and the ambulance ride from hell, and then she’d go home and Tom would start talking about how dangerous her job was to both of them, how much stress she was under, if they just moved away everything would get back to normal. First he fixed on Nebraska, until she snapped at him. 

“Don’t you know how hard I worked to get away from the little town where I grew up?” she responded at last, out of patience, the third night of the inquest. 

“What about New York, then? We were happy there, right?” he’d said, mulish and oblivious to her resolve.

Were they, she wondered, somehow she couldn’t remember that at all. 

**

“I’m not moving, Tom,” she told him, when he still hadn’t given up by the end of the week, “My life is here, my job is here. I’ve made commitments. I’ve got a career.”

“What about us? What about our life, together -- I thought you wanted a family, how is that supposed to work when you’re getting yourself nearly killed every other week?” he’d demanded in return and there was a awful note in his voice, a whine like she was being so unreasonable and he was being so patient for putting up with her.

“My father died a month ago. My job has turned into trying to catch the worst possible monsters you can imagine, and I’m sorry but that is more important right now. I just don’t have any room right now for new life, I don’t have it in me. I’m sorry, Tom, but I can’t move and I certainly can’t see how we bring a child into this, not now, not how things are,” she’d said with a grave surety she didn’t often show him, and was surprised to realize that all of these things were true. That she meant them. That she couldn’t hope for family, now that the world around her had turned hard and unsteady and alien.

He’d taken it better than he might have, she supposed. He’d walked out of the house without a word and slipped back in a couple hours later, smelling of cold, damp outside air and cigarettes rather than alcohol or perfume, the way some men might, and stalked upstairs to their bedroom, closing the door with a quiet but definite snap. She stayed downstairs pretending to work on case notes until she fell asleep in her chair.

A chilly silence settled into her house, between them then. Tom sulked and pretended that he wasn’t sulking, either that or suddenly he didn’t care at all. Liz found she was was avoiding looking at him, glancing at his profile, over his shoulder, ignoring the pinched look on her husband’s face, the way he didn’t talk about school at all, or try and cajole her into understanding, or offer to cook anymore. Not that she was ever home in time for dinner.

Eventually she was considered fully debriefed by her superiors, and she had finally managed to convince them that she had no earthly idea where Red might be, because as usual he hadn’t really told her anything. She was sent home at the end of the week and told not come back for a while.

Compassionate leave they called it, because she’d only taken 3 days off between cases to go to her father’s funeral. She was pretty sure it was ‘we don’t know what to do with you when Reddington’s not here’ leave. She tried not to take it personally, it was true she could use the break. It was just that what waited for her at home was a thick, suffocating tension that she couldn’t seem to figure out how to fix or abate in way.

**

The first day off, she went to visit Ressler in the hospital, finally. She hadn’t seen him since Garrick’s men had led her away from the Box at gunpoint. She’d been at work far past visiting hours every day since then. It was surreal, seeing him that way, stranded in a hospital bed, his face pale and pinched with pain. She hovered by the doorway, unsure of her welcome, but he seemed happy enough to see her, which was a rarity in an of itself. She managed to perch awkwardly on the edge of the visitor’s chair, realizing that she was there at least partly because she was working her way around to apologizing for Red pointing a gun at him to make him give up the code and spare her. She wasn’t going to, though. It was nothing she had asked for, nothing he did deserved her guilt, and she had no allegiance to him that she should apologize in his stead.

“Glad to see you got out of it okay, Keen,” he said, “Meera came to visit a couple days ago, she, ah, summarized what happened.”

“She took your statement already?” She wasn’t surprised, Agent Malik was very good at her job.

“Yep. Don’t know if it will help you guys, they were giving me something top notch in my drip,” he smiled broadly and lifted the hand that was still hooked up to an IV. Still on some pretty good stuff, she guessed, he didn’t usually joke with her.

She tried for small talk for a while until it came down to what they both seemed to really wanted to talk about.

“Have you heard from Reddington,” he asked at last, obviously expecting that she had.

“He called me that night, after…” she shrugged, she’d already told the investigation all about it, they’d made her go over and over it, so she was long past the tender feeling of divulging what felt personal, “He didn’t tell me anything except that he would be away. I think he only called so I -- so we wouldn’t think he was dead in a ditch somewhere. No clues, nothing, the number he called from was a payphone.”

“Meera said you were pretty determined to find Reddington, after you got away,” he said, speculative, like he was prodding for a deeper answer, “That was quick thinking, by the way.”

She nodded noncommittally, unwilling to clarify if she was admitting to the fervency of her search or assenting to his praise. She didn’t owe Ressler explanations about that, after all he’d chased the man for five years. He must have scrambled just as hard at times, he must have taken it personally sometimes too.

“What did you talk about?” she found herself asking, and yes, this was probably why she’d come, “You were trapped together for a long time.” And he likes to talk, she meant, he always talks at the worst possible moment, until you wanted to snap.

“It’s kind of a blur to be honest. I lost a lot of blood. He said something about saving the person that’s in front of you. He said something about sailing. He was Reddington, you know. Weird, reckless, not very sane. Surprisingly human.”

Sailing, she thought, I’ll look into that. Maybe he was somewhere by the sea. 

“Don’t do what I did, Keen,” he told her suddenly, recognizing the hungry look in her face, “Don’t throw your life away on this quest. If he’s gone, don’t keep chasing until you’re gone too.”

“I’m not,” she said, “I won’t. I’m on leave anyway.”

What life, she thought, i think it’s already gone.

**

She couldn’t sleep next to Tom, his huffing sleep breaths that had always gotten on her nerves, his new, distant, watchfulness, not even with a wide margin of bed between them. She tried, for a while, to drift off, holdinging herself as close to the edge of the mattress as she could. Tom had snapped at her for that the other night, that he wasn’t going to put a finger on her if she felt like that about it, that he wasn’t a monster, for god’s sake.

She gave up. She went instead to the room with the boxes. 

**

Some things Judy had kept, things from their shared childhood. Some things, from her own childhood, she already stored, in the attic, in the basement, in the back of her closet. When she and Tom had been so excited about starting the process to adopt, she gone home for a time, to visit her dad, talk to him about what it was like raising her. She had wanted more of the things from when she was a little girl near by, in preparation, in hopes that she might share her early books and surviving toys with her own child.

Mostly they were full of books, and papers. Photo albums. A stunningly huge number of case files, the archives of the whole PI business, it seemed. She wondered why Vic hadn’t taken any of it. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he didn’t have room. He’d retired years back and moved out into the woods somewhere in Oregon, where he had family. He sent her postcards sometimes, with pictures of mountains on them.

Of course, she realized some time in high school that it wasn’t just a PI firm, or wasn’t only one. She’d never told anyone about that, not even Malcolm, years ago, or Tom. Somehow Red knew though. Somehow Red knew everything, he was omniscient that way, inexorable. He’d been everywhere, all the time, and she hadn’t even noticed.

In one carton, on top of a whole lot of old home made cassette tapes, was a stacks of her dad’s notebooks, the ones that cops and reporters use, bundled together with big rubber bands. It all smelled old and dusty, faintly of damp, from the basement of the old house. She lifted out one of the bundles and unbound it. She couldn’t even track what was written inside the first notebook, she couldn’t see past the shock, horrible and wonderful and familiar, or seeing her father’s handwriting again. 

In another, on top of a stack of photo albums, was a long metal box, like a small toolbox, with chipped enamel and a little lock. It took her a moment to remember that her father’s keys were now sitting in a little dish of knick-knacks and change on the hall table downstairs. She got them and brought them back, and tried the unidentified tiny yale key on the set in the lock. The thing opened with an easy twist. Inside was jumble of more papers, more pictures, more odds and ends from the business, a passport, and a tiny green matchbox car she almost remembered giving him from her set of them. She remembered playing with them at his desk at the office after he picked her up from school, suddenly and completely remembered, how it felt to be little and sitting on her father’s lap and driving her tiny brightly coloured cars over up and over the obstacles of his stapler and rolodex. She put a finger on little green metal roof. Then she reached under the toy to excavated the stack of photos.

**

When Red first showed up in her life, really showed up, when her first day at a new job started with a helicopter ride, he’d made some comments indicating he knew her family. She could never figure out if he meant he knew Sam or he knew her biological family. 

After the day in Wujing’s underground bunker, where Red had coldly shot a man just to protect her identity, he had sat beside her in the back of that plush car. He had looked at her with such intensity, with such knowingness. He warned her that the answers were far from simple, the look on his face telling her that she should expect them to hurt, when she found them.

He told her that he would do anything to keep her alive. Alive, he’d said, not safe, not as though he cared, but as though she was valuable. It chilled to think of, she couldn’t fathom what her value might be to a man like Red, and that was the first piece that fell away, the first crack as the ground began to fall away underfoot.

And yet, that’s how it always began of course, and yet. He wouldn’t stay in the neatly partitioned place marked Dangerous Criminal, he defied classification, he slithered out of even the profile she had pinned him with at that restaurant that had made him freeze and deflect. Persistence and caring were terrible, insidious tools, and he wielded them well. It wasn’t as though she forgot, that he was a liar and a traitor and could not mean her well in the end, it was just that she’d acclimated to the idea. It was just that, as everything else around her began to dissolve, there he was, capricious and commanding as a creature from another world, setting a path out before of her, promising her protection if she would only follow him into the wild wood.  
She was a grown thing though, unloving and unmoved, she would not be led as a child by the hand. (Oh but he had held her hand so sweetly that day, when her love for her husband had been overmastered by her doubt, even after, she could not forget that.) She would not blindly surrender to her gruesome fate, she would tear away the fine tissue of her ignorance and stare it down.

**

One of the photographs, buried in the middle of the stack, was an old polaroid, colour shifted with age, and small and curled. It was a snapshot taken in someone’s back yard, with part of a blue house in the background, an unpainted picnic table in foreground. There was Sam, grinning for the camera, young and vibrant and alive. His arm slung around the shoulders of another young man, of a height, with short fluffy, lightish hair, who looked off to the side rather than at the camera, squinting slightly in the sun. Leaning against the legs of the man-who-was-not Sam was a small pixyish child, hardly out of toddlerhood, barefoot, wearing a tutu and brandishing a glittery gold wand like a sword, a wide, sly smile gracing her girlish face.

It took her a minute, to recognize him. At first she was ready to dismiss this man and this girl-child as strangers who passed out of Sam’s life before she became a part of it. But there was some nagging thing about shape of his nose, his chin, the line of his shoulders where they hunched just slightly under the weight of Sam’s arm. It was the early or mid eighties, she guessed by the clothes, not so long before she would be Sam’s daughter. And there was her father, standing beside an impossibly young and boyish Raymond Reddington.

She stared at the picture for a long, long time, sitting crosslegged on the floor in the midst of the mess she’d made of the partially unpacked cartons. Her father’s young face and Red’s even younger one, both of them hale and strong and somehow terrifically vulnerable -- and lost to her, separated by a great wasteland of time. The image was too small to give her much real information, their faces so small she could eclipse them with her thumb. All of the horrors that were to come had yet to visit them when this picture was taken, she could tell that even if she didn’t quite know what those horrors were. 

Young Red looked boyish, fine featured, supple and vibrant and lovely the way some young men are. Of course, she thought, of course, no wonder he had such meteoric success on both sides of the law, and at such an age, people want to give you things when you look like that. But this pretty creature was not the man she knew. Time would strengthen him, give him power, and grief, make him into a force of nature as much as a man. 

And the girl, she thought, what would become of the girl? 

She put the picture back into the middle of the stack, tucked the lot back into the box, and locked it back up tight. She worked the little key off the ring, and this took some time because her fingers were clumsy with lack of sleep, and tucked it into the pocket of her sweatshirt. It wasn’t as though hiding the key would stop anyone interested from picking the lock, it was just a sign of old habits kicking in.

**


	2. moves often according to the hoarding of these clues

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The machinery of the world is unrelenting, a small discovery leads to a larger one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do apologize for the wait on this one, a combination of work, technological issues and sheer exhaustion kept me unable to work for a while, but I'm back with it now -- and have a fairly definite plan for this. Realistically it will be about 5/6 chapters rather than the 3 I originally thought and will all be progressively more canon divergent from here on out. One of the big things that put me off working on this for a while were certain revelations in the finale, and after much thought I've decided to stick to my original plan. With Greatest Thanks to my beta and sounding board, harrietspecter!

_While back in the world that moves, often, according to_  
_the hoarding of these clues,  
\-- Only Skin, Joanna Newsom_

At times it seemed as though her life moved according to certain prohibitions on looking, as though she is in some strange and senseless fairytale. She wonders sometimes if she is the girl from the winter wood who must not hold the candle up to see the face of the Bear Who Was A Prince, or if she is the cursed and displaced Melusina, who grants power and love but gives birth to monsterous things and must not be observed while bathing -- and she knows that one day, as was always meant to happen, the prohibition will be broken and the promised doom with come for them all. 

When she was a child, transplanted into her new life and raw with it, she came to realize that there were memories that had to be banished, and she learned to turn her face away. They still played out for a time, in her dreams. She remembered awaking in the blackest part of night, sitting in the middle of her bed and crying and crying, until her father would come. She could never explain, she didn’t have words, in the waking world, for what she saw and felt in that dream place. She grew out of it, though, and passed them off as the nightmares of any small child.

And then, later there was her father’s business, that was not his business, or not at all what it seemed, and she must not question, never press too closely into what went on. After all he was just her father, at home, ordinary as anyone. By the time she was allowed in, let in on the secret, she was already almost on her way out the door to start her own independent life.

By the time Tom came along, she knew too well how to avoid seeing the whole of what she faced, how to see only out of the corner of her eye and not confront what it _meant_. She didn’t even realize, by then, that she lived this way, saw this way. She had forgotten how to lift her head and see what had engulfed her.

**

She spent a lot a lot of time in the the spare room with the boxes after that, going through the files, and the records of her father’s finances, sorting them into some semblance of order. It’s rough system at best, piles of papers on the floor, things that were important, things to look into, things to store, things to make note of and shred. It was unsettling, seeing the truth of her father’s business this way. She had known already, of course. She had helped out, at times, when he allowed it, when he realized she had a certain knack. But somehow he had still kept her in the dark about the scope of his endeavours. He and Vic had been getting up to much more for much longer than she had realized. It was hard to make herself process it all, she found over and over that she was skimming, hurrying through it all and not actually taking much in. It took her an embarrassingly long time to realize that she was searching for Red’s hand in all this. She was sure it was there. She wasn’t sure what good it would do if she found the signs, but she knew they were there. It was like searching for the earliest signs of some creeping disease.

It kept her busy every night the first week of her “leave” and Tom let her be, only appearing from time to time to peer down at her from the doorway as he came by to tell her dinner was there if she wanted it, or when he was on his way to get ready for bed.

“I thought you said the estate was all squared away,” he said one night, arms crossed over his chest as he leaned on the doorjam. He couldn’t come farther into the room and easily avoid stepping on the papers and files laid out over the floor in broad arcs, and then ranks and columns.

“Well, it turns out it wasn’t. There’s just a lot to go through. I think I’m almost done, though,” she stretched and looked blandly up at her husband with a smile that felt like a wince.

“Okay. Well don’t stay up too late with all this. I didn’t even feel you come to bed yesterday.” he gave her what she was beginning to think of as his Concerned Husband Smile and retreated.

**

She had fallen asleep on the floor two nights running, when she’d laid down to try and stretch out her back. She’d woken early, feeling as sore and ragged as after their most arduous takedowns, to Hudson snuffling around her face, obviously worried about the strange behavior of his human. She felt bad about that, her marriage had begun to drag at her like some kind of evil harness and her work, the sense of purpose she’d always depended on, had turned strange and unstable, but these were human concerns, and Hudson was a steady creature who needed his routines.

She took the dog for a long walk that morning, needing the time and space and movement begin to work through everything she’d read. Yes, her father’s business was different than even she’d been aware of. Yes, he’d had contact with Reddington on and off for years. Yes, Reddington had almost certainly been the source of funds used to pay her school fees and college tuition. She wasn’t sure what to think of it all, except it made her feel cold all over, it made it feel like her father was slipping away all over again, like he was turning into a stranger even in her memory, under the dark pall of Reddington’s influence. But was that influence so very dark? 

He’d been gone almost three weeks, and she’d still not let herself really remember the day of the incursion. During the investigation, she’d told her story over and over, but she’d spoken of it drily, from a distance, not letting any of it play out behind her eyes as she was interviewed. Not let herself revisit what had happened, really viscerally happened as she strode around in the dark, trying to take out enemy operatives and signal scramblers, as she had watched Red come out of that awful bloody box for her, with Luli’s still-warm body lying on the ground between them, awful and lifeless, the bruising grip of Garrick’s man hauling her along, and Garrick himself with his sagging face leering at her and what he had thought he’d seen between her and Red. She’d felt sick with terror but also strong, unbent, strangely clear and bright and alive as though someone had started a chemical reaction in her that lit her up, made her feel invulnerable, unstoppable. That had been _hers_ and she wasn’t going to let her interrogators anywhere near.

And she certainly hadn’t let herself think about that terrible jolt she’d felt watching that woman with her scalpel and her finger in Red’s neck, how wrapped round with horror she’d felt -- and then how steadily her eyes had sought out his, how easy it had been to understand his silent instructions and act. Get herself out. It wasn’t until she stood on the street, watching the ambulance speed away and feeling ragged and flung out by the momentum of the day, that she had realized how wholey and profoundly she was unwilling for that to be the last she ever saw of him. But it had been. So far it had been. There was just that one phone call keeping her from the creeping suspicion that he’d slipped away, mortally wounded into the dark, and she’d never been so glad to see the demise another human being as she was over that of Garrick. The small sting of satisfaction that Reddington had bested him in the end worried her almost more than anything. Perhaps she was becoming just as much a stranger as it seemed suddenly her father had been.

She walked and walked in the brisk and changeful morning air until her dog pulled at his leash, trying to lead them off the sidewalk, and she found she’d taken them to the park without even realizing it. It was a bleak, overcast day, and there was no one much around so she sat on a bench alone and Hudson sat at her feet until the both of them were rested enough to make their way home. As hard as she’d tried she found that still none of it fitted neatly or easily in her mind, she only knew that she was on the verge of something, that some awful realization was bearing down on her and was bringing on some tectonic shift and she might be able to grasp it if only she could remember how to _look_.

**

After a time she realized she’d gotten all that she could out of the files, so she packed them back away, and this in itself felt like passing through another threshold of distance. Her throat was scratchy and thick with dust and the smell of damp that lingered and the obscure sense of ruthless self denial she feels as she makes good on her categories of Keep, Store, Destroy. Tom doesn’t interfere, doesn’t question her again, makes the passing assumption that her little project is wrapping up.

She wasn’t doing any better at being able to fall asleep beside her husband. Tom had started to look at her strangely in the mornings when he finds her camped out in the livingroom, dozing on the couch, having fallen asleep watching old movies or episodes of M*A*S*H on Netflix, trying to pretend that she’s still a normal woman, without a past and a present that were both twisting wildly out of shape. He’s getting this distant, calculating look. Sometimes she sees it out of the corner of her eye as they amble around like strangers in their house.

**

One night she gave in against the prohibition she had set upon herself, against the needy tenor of her curiousity. Long after husband and dog were both asleep, she went straight for the long metal box, armed with the little key, and pulled out the stack of pictures again. She looked at all of them this time, closely and carefully. Most of them are of Sam, Sam and Judy when they were teenagers, Sam and Maggie, the woman he almost married before he became a dad and moved away from Chicago. A couple of her, as a little girl in the house in the Chicago suburbs that she didn’t really remember, wearing that bobbed haircut and those heavy straight bangs, smiling up the camera and clutching a tatty, floppy teddy bear. One of her dressed up for Halloween with Nick and little Amy, that first year in Nebraska, and she _did_ remember that, her little cowboy sheriff costume with the little red cowboy hat that she and Nick fought over for months afterwards. Her cousins, she supposed, weren’t and couldn’t have been caught up in any of this. They, at least, had to be pretty much who she thought they were. It was she who was the changeling child, the wild, alien thing dropped into their midst, strange and fierce and soulful. She had never suited them terribly well, and she had never quite understood them. 

She came again to the picture of Sam and Red and the girl. It was the only one with him, she was sure of that. The familiarity seemed obvious, and not at all begrudging. So they were friends. So Red hadn’t pushed his way into Sam’s life like a destructive force the way he had in hers. It only seemed more and more obvious that her father could not have been blameless and separate in this association. 

It was with that same claustrophobic wrench she’s felt so many times lately she knew she’d done wrong to never ask her father so many things. It was all left too late, even the most important things, and even regret so fierce it froze her skin wouldn’t change that.

It was strange, but in the weeks since Sam’s death, memories of her childhood had walked abroad in her, as she dreamt, as she sat in thought, like they never had before. It was like some door had opened or a latch loosed, and she who had never been one to dwell except on the facts and figures she need for her work, was filled all up with bruising nostalgia. A sense that she had somehow blundered through years and years as blind and unaware as a child, that for all her education, the unforgiving nature of her job, day to day experiences with human rankness, there had been nothing much to wake her into her own skin and make her see the reality of her own surroundings.

Now her awareness was limned with a terrible clarity, the details of her quietest days seemed to impress themselves on her, her familiar house, the dim, faintly green light in the corner store -- even the lines of Tom’s face stood out to her, as though suddenly new and unknown. She’d heard of this, of course; she knew that grief did strange things to the brain, but she hadn’t understood what it would feel like to live inside it, with all her senses abraded and raw and the monstrous, unmasked machinery of the world pulling on her. Even here in the her cloistered fastness behind her maze of boxes, it pulled her. 

**  
She took the picture from the stack, assigning only the most basic reasons why it fascinated her so, and tucked the others away again, fully satisfied they held no other revelations. The next day, realizing she shouldn’t leave it in her bedside drawer, she slipped it instead into a file of old case notes she’d kept tucked away, in a box of other old files, in the back of the bedroom closet. It was here that something occurred to her, long delayed and awful, sending her stumbling for the support of the chest of drawers. She breathed slowly and carefully, reminding herself that Tom was out the way he always was at 10 am on a Tuesday, until she regained her footing.

She slid the files back into place and washed and dressed, her mind blank and numb and flinching from what she’d just discovered. She had to keep reminding herself there was no reason to keep checking over her shoulder. She collected Hudson’s leash and called for him, her voice verging on frantic until he wandered over, calm and curious, from his big round cushion in the living room with his tail wagging. Liz shepherded them both out of the house and into the car with the sensation of something chasing, watching her her all the way, like an impossible fantasm, though she knew she was alone, that there was no real danger. It was just that now that she _knew_ , that knowing spread backward in mind, all that time she has walked so unaware and unprotected spurred her forward now like a thing chased.

She wound up in the park, by the little pavilion where she had waited out Tom’s interrogation, and Red had waited with her. Her dog whined and pulled at his leash, unsure why they were outside and not walking or playing, but Liz sat limp and immobile, clasping hard at Hudson’s leash ‘til her hands stiffened up and started to cramp around it and she finally moved enough to release the lock on the line to let him roam a little farther afield. 

It had been important to her to get out of that house, and Hudson with her, and after a time he seemed to sense her distress, and came to force his head under her elbow and rest his chin on her knee, brown eyes confused and worried as they gazed up at her. She ran over it again in her mind and could find no new solution. The box she had pulled out from under the floorboards had been tucked into her box of old case notes, under all the folders, in a storage bin in the back of the closet with her old college stuff. There was absolutely no reason for Tom to be looking through all her things, unless he had discovered that the box wasn’t in it’s original hiding place, and why would he have looked for it in it’s hiding place if it was planted and he didn’t know it was there? Even if he had suspected her of having an affair, he might have checked her coats, her phone, her bag, things she used every day but it strained all credulity that he might go looking in things she hadn’t touched in years, save for day she had stashed that damned box, when he was out at school. Supposedly. Was he ever really at school? He must be sometimes, she reasoned, she’d met some of his coworkers, she went to the little Holliday play the year before, not all of it could have been pure fabrication, could it?

She needed a plan. She needed to know if she was sure. She needed to talk to Red. The avenues open to her, he had said, well what did that even mean? She’d had to explain about being in communication with one of Red’s contacts in the effort to find him, the FBI did know, in the vaguest sense, about Mr. Kaplan, and she assumed that Kaplan would have moved somewhere new and secret in deference of that fact, but she could think of no other recourse.

She called the hotel and asked for the right suite, for Mr. Kaplan, and the bland voice on the other end politely told her that no one by that name was currently in residence. 

“Wait,” she said, in desperation when the clerk went to hang up, “I think… he’ll have left some way to get in touch, please, it’s very important. My name is Elizabeth Keen, he might have a message for me.”

“Hold on one moment,” said the anonymous voice, “Yes, we do have a message for one Liz Keen, I’m afraid you will have to come and pick it up in person, though, we have strict instructions to check your ID.”

Understandable precaution she supposed, “Alright, I’ll come and pick it up.”

**

The message was brief, just another hotel and another suite number, so she sat in car and made the call, not quite willing to present herself at Mr. Kaplan’s door, unsure of her welcome, unsure of how desperate she wanted to seem to get in touch with Red.

She had some idea, if she really thought about it, what it was he was up to. He was hunting. When the way is clear, he had said, and there was a mole in black site, there had to be a mole among his own organization as well, and he was hardly going to let them live with their guilt once he found them. She was sure that notion should chill her, make her fear him, but she was already chilled, she was already in fear, she had already let a man into her life and her bed who had blood on his hands, and all she could feel was rage that someone had let that vile man Garrick and his mercenaries into their midst, that her partner was going to be doing physical therapy for months, had nearly lost his leg, and that Luli Zheng, as little known as she’d been to Liz, had died crying in fear. Red had gone hunting, and that was all right with her. It’s just that she couldn’t think now, except to turn to him. It was just that he knew more than he’d said, and she’d refused to hear it, and now she needed to know, it was just that it now seemed that Sam had stood by him, so either he was a better man than he seemed or all three of them were much worse, much farther gone than she’d ever realized.

Her phone rang, an unlisted number on the screen. she answered.

“Hello, Dearie,” said Mr. Kaplan, “I wondered when I was going to hear from you.”

“I... was hoping you could,” Liz began, and then stopped and began again. “I need to talk to Red. Do you know how to reach him?”

 

**

It wasn’t hard in the end, to convince Kaplan to give up a number that would let her contact him. She had sounded almost fond, almost amused. “You are protected, Elizabeth,” she’d said. “He wouldn’t have it any other way, and neither would I,” and she’d bid Liz to look after herself, that she would be reachable by the same contact information, “barring any outside interference.”

When it came to the moment when she must make the call, she hesitated, sure she was about to set the implacable gears turning, put into motion, another awful string of events that once started would drag her on through ‘til their unknown conclusion. This is what she’d felt, perhaps, looming over her for weeks and weeks. But the day was growing long, the weather was turning, the winter sun dimming down into late afternoon, and Tom would soon be wondering where she was. So she called him.

“Lizzy,” he said and his voice sounded rusty, tight and flat and not the warm sound she was used to, “I didn’t expect to hear from you while I was… away. Is there something I can help you with?”

“I know,” she said, and found she was nearly whispering though she sat in the safety of her car, with only her dog sleeping in the back seat, “I know about Tom. He found the box.”

“Yes, Lizzy, I remember. It was only a few months ago--”

“No,” she cut in, her voiced strained, frantic, and suddenly as she said it, all of it was real, pressing on her, choking her, and she hated how she needed him to tell her what to do, she needed him to understand her immediately and show her that way out through the woods, “No, I mean I know he couldn’t have found it, he should never have, unless he was looking for it. He must have been looking for it, Red. He was looking for it.”

There were several long beats of silence, and she listened hard for any signs of movement or reaction down the line, she found she was once again curled in, slouching protectively around her phone, her tenuous connection to the next criminal in whom she was placing her trust, the man who had promised to lead her through the dark.

“I’m sorry,” he said soft and low and there was the tone she knew, her tone, “I’m sorry this has happened to you and that you have discovered it now when I can’t -- the way is not clear, do you understand, Lizzy?”

“Yes,” she said, and her voice wobbled precariously. Her vision whited out with tears. “But when will it be? It’s been a month, how long can it possibly take?”

“Has something happened, Lizzy? Where are you?”

“In my car,” she said, putting her hand out to the door panel and then her forehead as if to check that it was so, that she and the car were both still there, “Near Mr. Kaplan’s old hotel.”

“Have you done anything? Said anything to him?” 

“No, I haven’t even seen him since I figured it out. Do you suppose he ever really goes to that school in the day? No, it doesn’t matter -- What do I do, Red? You have to tell me what I do now?” And she was weeping now, she knew, and hoped he couldn’t tell, her forehead pressed hard in her hand, because all of it a was wrong, all of it felt like her world dissolving around her again, and all of it was his fault, except all he’d done was open her eyes to what was there, and hadn’t she wanted to remember how to _see_? Only she had failed to anticipate how much it would feel like being pitched off the edge of the world.

“If you go to Kaplan, she can put you somewhere safe, if that’s what you need, Lizzy. But I’m so sorry… I’m afraid I have to advise you to remain in place, at least for now. If you are sure he doesn’t suspect you know. The truth is,” he paused and gave a sigh, she could hear a hint of it over the line, “I’m not sure what his purpose is here, or rather, what his master’s purpose is. He was put into place to show me they have access to you, but more than that…” he trailed off.

“Well then, what good are you?” she demanded, thinking _you were supposed to know all of it, you were supposed to tell me as soon as I showed I would ask._ She wished he was there so she could reach out and strike at him or rail at him but it wouldn’t work at a distance, and besides she frozen inside at the thought that _he didn’t know_ \-- that perhaps Red wasn’t an omniscient force, for all that he’d done to prove himself knowing, and perhaps he wouldn’t have had to try so hard to impress that on her if he really had been.

“There is no way for me to say how much… I regret that this happening to you,” he said, and he wasn’t supposed to sound so tender, so much like she was causing him pain, when she was well on her way to being furious with him. “I won’t be gone much longer, I will come to you as soon as I am able, and it will be soon, I promise you. You can leave and be kept safe, and I won’t fault you in the least, but we will have lost a chance to track down the hand that holds the leash. You can remain in place and _do nothing to give yourself away_ and I will be back to help you investigate him. Or you can, I suppose, try again to try again to turn him in, but he was already cleared once, I’m not sure it will be any more effective this time. The choice is yours, Lizzy and no matter what you choose, there is nothing that will make me think any less of you.”

So the decision fell to her, and maybe she was still in freefall, but she remembered that chemical light within that told her she was able, she remembered all the ways Tom had touched her and realized she had consented to wear a false name, and wearing that name walked into her training to become a Special Agent, had tried to become an agent for the side of good, and maybe that was why it had never quite taken. She wasn’t going to let him, and his flat eyes and his accommodating smile slip back into the woodwork just because she didn’t have the stomach to wait for his inevitable mistake, the thing that gave him away once and for all. Or his head on a platter, whichever came first

“What if I shot him,” she said, and didn’t recognize her voice at all, it was hard and dry and past all tears, and she knew the instant she’d said it that she wasn’t ruling it out.

“You could do that,” he said and he sounded speculative, maybe almost like he approved, or maybe like he disapproved, she has having a hard time hearing over the sound of rushing blood in her ears, “If you do, call Mr. Kaplan again, she’s a miracle worker.”

“You want the man that holds the leash,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You think this unknown person is a threat to you?”

“Yes. To both of us, since obviously he knows you are… important to me.”

“Well.” She took a deep breath that was almost a gasp, her hand against her clavicle to steady her pounding bird-heart that was ready to take flight, knowing she had already decided but just needing to say the words, “I’m going to stay put. I’m going to wait it out. And you’re going to come back soon. And then you’re going to tell me everything you know.”


	3. we are restless things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liz lives with her reality. Liz remembers. Suitable reinforcements are called.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't think I've ever updated something this quickly in my life, but I wanted to be sure I got a little farther before Work Project gets ahold of me in again. I'm afraid I can't promise to get the next one done this fast, but I will try. This story speaks to me. Chapter is unbeta'd so please forgive any mistakes I have missed. I was impatient to get this up here. This chapter is for my dear Alicemorganss/eliizabethkeen. Apologies for a continuing lack of Red, but I assure you he will be back very soon, you need only wait until the next chapter is posted.

_Press on me,_  
 _we are restless things._  
 _Webs of seaweed are swaddling._  
 _You call upon the dusk of the_  
 _musk of a squid:_  
 _shot full of ink, until you sink into your crib._

_\--Only Skin, Joanna Newsom_

The first night after she knew was the hardest. It was nearly impossible to act naturally around Tom, even more so because she hadn’t been acting naturally around him for weeks now, and to suddenly bounce back in an attempt to seem like her old self would be even more obviously out of the ordinary. 

He was already home from school when she and Hudson walked in. It had taken her a good ten minutes to become willing to get out of the car and walk into her own home, trying to find some calm and peaceable face to put on. She kept her face turned down as she came in because it would be obvious if he looked that she had been crying, but then she realized she’d had more than one reason for tears lately. Hudson stuck close to her side even after she unhooked his leash, practically leaning against her legs, in solidarity perhaps, or feeling the new and sickening level of tension.

“I wondered where you guys were, you didn’t leave a note or anything,” said Tom as she put away her coat.

“Sorry, I,” she stopped, not sure what direction to take, “It was kind of a whim, I guess. We had a really long walk in the park. He hasn’t been getting enough exercise lately and I’ll be back at work soon.”

“Okay, I was worried, that’s all,” he said and he really did have that little worried frown between his eyebrows, she would have believed him if she hadn’t known, she would have apologized again, promised to let him know just where she was… it chilled her right through with a thrill like mortal fear and she took an involuntary half-step backwards that she disguised behind a move to reach for Hudson’s collar and guide him into the kitchen for food and water.

“I wasn’t sure what you wanted to do for dinner, I was thinking maybe Thai?” he called after her, in his usual unruffled middle-class californian drawl, and she wondered, _is he such a good actor or does he really feel that secure here? Does he really think he has me, unquestioning and willing?_

**

She had almost finished with the boxes of her father’s things and that wouldn’t be an excuse for much longer. As tempted as she was to draw out her project it occurred to her she should get it all packed up and announce she was taking it out to a storage unit, maybe with some of her old things to add veracity. If Tom really wasn’t what he seemed, and now she felt sure of that, even if it was flimsy proof at best in the eyes of the law, then she didn’t want him to have access to some of the things in her father’s files. Certain things she knew she must investigate but that shouldn’t be known outside of the family.

She tried to settle in with her laptop and the stack of things she’d meant to look into further, but her heart was still beating too fast and her mind wandered easily, none of it could hold her interest and she looked around at the careful order she’d made of all this information, all these papers, as though all of it was foreign and unconnected to her. There was the impulse under her skin, like a small persuasive whisper, to get out, to run, to wait till Tom slept and fill up her car with all it could fit and take her dog and go. Not just go, but go to Red, she was willing to acknowledge that now, to herself, even if she would recant later when her head was clear. She could hand herself over to the brusque care of Mr. Kaplan as his proxy, and let whatever happened next happen out of her sight while she stood under the hand of his protection. But she was unwilling to go back on her word and more than that, Tom was her mistake and she was unwilling to leave him for someone else to clean up, it was just the scope of what she’d agreed to sinking in.

**

In the end she gave in to the defensive impulse to put on a facade of normalcy. She got ready for bed and slid between the cool sheets on her side of the mattress for the first time in days, staring up at the ceiling in the dark room, her husband a warm, drowsy weight only slightly more than a foot distant from her. He was still human after all, and could not suspect, and he still smelled like soap and toothpaste as he got into bed for the night.

“Project finished then?” he asked quietly without turning, settled in on his side facing away from her, like usual.

“Yep. Almost anyway,” she said. Her voice was nearly normal, no more strained than it might be if she were merely tired. 

Tom slept easily, though not quietly, he often moved and twitched as though beset by active, prodding dreams, but she had always been amazed by the way he was never stricken with insomnia they way she was from time to time. She lay stiff and still, trying not to tighten all her muscles against the soft bed and wondered abstractedly about the incongruity of a man who led a double life yet rested easily every night. It didn’t trouble him, she supposed, it must not prick is conscience if he had showed no strain, no regret or edginess even after almost three years together. He hadn’t even suffered nightmares after Zamani’s attack, and she realized that in itself should have been a warning sign. 

With time she fell into a light doze, and then a blank kind of deeper sleep on the edge of awareness that kept her until Tom’s alarm went off and he got up, and she turned on her side and shuffled under the covers like a child hiding from the dark and he left her be. She listened, heart beating so hard her fingertips tingled, for the front door to close behind him half an hour later, and found that once she knew she was alone, she was too exhausted to carry out her plans, too limp even to venture out from under the covers. Liz gave in and slept, and dreamed.

**

A man and a woman and a small girl child were in a car. They were driving a very long way and had been driving for a very long time. The girl was quiet, and tearful at times but did not actually cry. She sat in the woman’s lap because there was no booster seat for her. Sometimes she climbed into the back seat and stretched out on the cool black velour and slept. The man and the woman talked sometimes but not often, quietly, and the radio was on all the time, very low, not music but voices, the news.

The woman had long dark, glossy hair in a messy ponytail and smelled faintly of a rich, peachy perfume that felt like home to the girl, like being safe and loved. She would be looking for that scent without realizing it for years and years as a grown woman, would find herself near to tears once in a while in a department store, a bakery, without ever knowing why.

One time she woke from a nap on the back seat and she had a headache and she was just so tired of being in the car, cranky, kicking at the dashboard softly with her sneakered toe, and even the woman, her mother, singing their song didn’t relieve the boredom, and the man behind the wheel looked over at them, speculative, and then smiled and took the next exit. They ended up at a rest stop that’s almost like a park, with a grassy area and a picnic table and a low cement building of restrooms and even though it was very, very cold, it’s dry and the girl was happy to amble around the little park and feel the fresh breeze on her face and sit on the picnic table facing her mother and the man with the sharp gaze and the turned up coat collar. 

There was a little restaurant that looked like a pretend log cabin inside, and they went there and sat in a squashy booth meant to fit a lot of people and the girl was given crayons and a color in menu and allowed to have hot chocolate with her grilled cheese sandwich and her mother said she didn’t have to eat the crusts as long as the crusts were smaller than two inches, because that wasn’t _all_ crust was it? Her mother and the man talked cryptically for a while and when the girl got bored she climbed under the table and up between them with her coloring and got the man to help her with the maze, and he was awkward with her, like he was just as wary of her as she had been of him, and when they all got back to the car, she realized that she’d left Best Bear in the back seat and hadn’t even noticed.

But all of them knew the trip was almost over, and her mother got quieter and quieter and started holding her tighter on her lap until the girl protested that it was uncomfortable, and her grip loosened a little. Her mother sang their song again, although her voice sounded a little hoarse and the girl leaned against her, tucked into her neck in the heavy, boneless way of children, her hard little skull and her downy soft hair and her warm breath against her mother’s shoulder.

**

She woke sometime later, as the afternoon began with a weak pearly winter sun glowing in the uncurtained window, and for that long but infinitesimal rising time as she moved out of the morass of sleep to solid ground, she wondered if perhaps the previous day’s revelations were a dream, or somehow a mistake and were now surely erased. But she opened her eyes and she knew it was all still true. There was no way out and no way around, and the Bureau wasn’t going to stand behind her, not without more than her own fish-cold, squirming certainty.

She had passed her first night as a woman as much in disguise as her husband, and she had survived it. It was strange the way, now that she was solid and rested and letting strategy gestate in the back of her mind, she felt a quickening inside, as though she had shucked an alien skin rather than donned one. She should have known, she supposed, that she was not the pleasant, golden girl of tolerance and love as in the more familiar tale, never could have been. No, she was after all the woman who hid a monstrous serpent within and when spied on by her prying, peering husband, she would swing round with rage, and bring flood and ruin down on him. 

She still had a few hours left until Tom would be back, and lately he’d been coming back later and later, long after the elementary school would have been closed up. She couldn’t count on that time though, she couldn’t risk him coming home and surprising her, so she began with a search.

**

It was very hard to search a house without making it look like it had been ransacked, let alone searched, it was even harder when it was your own things, that were familiar and seen every day and seemed to go invisible no matter how closely you tried to observe. She started in the bedroom closet, perhaps because that was where the realization had come upon her, and went through Tom’s drawers and clothes. She realized that he didn’t have boxes of things from college the way she did, he didn’t have childhood pictures in an album, in fact the most personal ephemera he stored was a shoebox of old CDs, and even they didn’t look older than a few years. 

She gave up. Searching the house would have to wait until she had the time to do it properly. He went on trips to conferences often enough, and trips for potential job interviews. She had never questioned it, had always been glad in a small, shameful way of the time to herself, the peace in the house with only Hudson to answer to. She had felt such guilt that she was always the one holding back, the one who’d had to try so hard to be open and loving, had to keep reminding herself how easy she’d felt with him at first, how good and patient he was. She had tried so hard to be deserving of that, of him. 

He had often said how he shared so much with her and he wished she might share more in return. He’d brought out this lament more and more lately, with her work turning so secretive. Now that she know that must all have been an act, she began to see how he had been pushing, softly bullying, tallying and controlling her responses. He told her how much he worried for her, if only she would tell him what she was doing he might not spend so much time distracted every day expecting the call that she’d been hurt on the job. He told her he hardly saw her anymore, and wondered how that was going to work when they had a family. He reminded her how many hoops they’d already had to jump through to adopt like she’d wanted.

She had congratulated herself when they had gotten together, on finally finding someone to love who admired her and worried about her, who paid her care and attention, someone sensitive enough to be loving and giving and present when they started their family. She had tried to tell herself that it was only the novelty of it that made her feel caged and herded and watched, that this is what a real adult relationship was.

But it seemed she was wrong after all, she _had_ been watched, she _had_ been catalogued and she still didn’t know why, not really. She had been kept and made to feel beholden until she tied herself in smaller and smaller knots to make herself worthy. And Tom had deserved none of it. He had meant none of it. He hadn’t loved and worried, he’d meant only to keep her back-footed and answering to him. The steady, deliberate insidiousness of it was finally becoming real to her, that what had to her had been a love affair, a marriage, a chance for family had been to him a strategy, a job. Now that she knew to look, she could see it, the painted set, forced perspective quality of their life together, the way the angles fitted together all wrong, and the set dressing shabby and unsentimental. 

Although he’d been eager enough to have her, at first hadn’t he, his hands careful and intent all over her, insatiable even, in the beginning. She was pretty enough, she knew, perhaps that was enough. Or perhaps he thought if he kept her physically satisfied she would love him more easily, perhaps he had looked at her life that had been lived largely alone and decided she must being going wanting, never understanding that her body didn’t often crave, that she didn’t have a reaching-out heart, that she lived often in the quiet egg of her mind, that smooth, round interior space she closely guarded.

She had the kind of face, sweet and a little bit solemn, that men often took as permission, as in invitation, to reach out to her, feel concern for her, express interest in her. It seemed to bring out a strange mix of paternal feelings and sexual interest in so many of the men around her, her teachers, her coworkers, her superiors. She could tell from the way they looked at her and spoke to her and leaned into her space, and tried to find ways to spend time with her, the way they had all felt she needed a bit of looking after. Malcolm had been that way until he’d become demanding, always needing more and more from her, and even Josh, aloof as he’d tried seem, had taken that patronizing tone with her when they were finally together to the point where it had seemed almost hectoring. She’d thought Tom was different, she’d thought they were beginning a life on equal footing. She’d been so willing to believe.

**

The second night passed more easily. Liz willingly took dinner with the man who pretended to be her husband, and got into bed beside him. She told him that her leave was almost up and she would be going back to work soon, though in truth she hadn’t heard from Cooper in almost three weeks. She turned out the bedside lamp, and after some hours of holding very still and pretending to sleep, she promised herself that she would be safe until morning and slept in earnest.

The next stretch of days were filled with an immense yet casual tension, as she was by turns filled with a bottomless simmer of anger and then fleeting, almost hopeful horror that she had after all made a mistake, that she couldn’t really suspect of all these terrible things, she couldn’t really be suspecting that Tom had at least one murder on his hands because that was the stuff of bad cinema. And she wondered, often, what soon meant, if he had meant it all, if he was going to make her sit and wait for as long as he could to punish her for her disbelief. But he wouldn’t do that, she had sense enough to know that. Her real certainties didn’t change, and they were simple facts. Tom was an imposter. Red would do what it took to keep her safe. That was enough for now.

**

Sense struck her, early one morning, after she’d again given up on sleeping in her own bed again, and instead camped out on the couch in spite of the way Tom questioned her about it in the morning. Once she had the house to herself, she called Kaplan and explained her predicament in brief, detached terms, and the woman promised to be there within the hour. She descended on the house with team of five people who were entirely unknown to Liz, they were not the same people she had seen the day of the Garrick Incursion. They carried bags of equipment and eyed Liz with curiosity but didn’t speak to her.

“You know what to do,” Kaplan told them sharply, “You’ve got until four so I suggest you get to it.”

Liz wanted more than anything to ask Kaplan if she really trusted these people, but such an insult seemed terribly ungrateful. Hudson snuffled around the legs of the interlopers as they began to move methodically around the house with their cameras, until Kaplan caught his attention and he turned into putty in her hands for ear scratches. It was reassuring to see Kaplan reduced to muttering sweet doggy nothings just like a normal person.

“Can I offer you some coffee? Or tea, or something?” asked Liz, feeling absurd and uncertain in her own kitchen, with Auntie J’s firm reminders about courtesy kicking in automatically. Kaplan smiled faintly up at her, eyebrow at a wry angle and Liz shrugged, embarrassed. “Well I don’t really know the etiquette for when you have people in to search your place,” she said.

“Why don’t we three take a walk. Most people find they don’t really care to observe this. It’s rather like dentistry, necessary, tedious, and rather grotesque. Surely this fellow would appreciate the exercise,” she reached down patted Hudson’s head, and sure enough, he had perked up at the word “walk” just like it was an average sort of day.

**

She had met Tom not long after things had fallen completely apart with Josh. Not long by her standards, anyway, months had passed, the better part of a year, but she was still smarting with it, with how badly her ambition had sat with Josh and how little he was willing to give up in return. They had started out as such friends, and it was a slow but inevitable slide into having an affair, and Liz would later chastise herself for how much hope she’d felt. The relationship itself lasted almost no time at all compared to the amount of time it had taken them to ease into it, and then for Liz to recover afterward. Josh had been there for her, from a distance, as her father went through cancer treatments the first time, and she’d been trapped thousands of miles away by work and studies and limited funds. For a very brief time when she was with him, she was deliriously happy. Then for a slightly longer time she’d been miserable but determined to preserve what had been so long in coming, what had finally been gained. The she found that she was pregnant, or rather thought she was for one week of terror and immeasurable longing, when she’d realized that she wanted children desperately, in spite of all the impossible complications of her work, her career. She also realized that she could never have that family with Josh, not with the way they picked and picked at each other until she felt raw and harried and confused.

Back then, though, she had thought she’d made it. That she’d started a real life in the real world, that the strangeness of her early days could no longer touch her. She thought she’d made a clean break. Even the breakup of a relationship could be put down to normalcy and pettiness, not the dissolution of the reality she’d built around herself.

Tom was introduced to her at a small party she’d been dragged to, as a boyfriend’s friend, and he’d been unattached and lovely and persistent, and none of his coaxing seemed to hide a jeer inside. He was a school teacher. He was from California. He was soft spoken and and considerate and was willing to go jogging with her early in the morning. She should have known, she supposed, that such an uncomplicated surface could only have been a disguise, it had to be if he’d shown up in her life.

**

So she and Kaplan and Hudson went out while the team documented everything, took everything apart, documented what they found, and put it back together again. She was happy enough to miss seeing the process carried out in front of her.

It was a strange walk with Kaplan, to be doing such an ordinary thing with someone she’d met for the first time under such outrageous circumstances. For the most part they kept silent, Liz glanced frequently over at her companion out of the corner of her eye but she didn’t catch the woman glancing back in turn, her inscrutable companion seemed to be focused out on the world around them. Hudson trotten between them, oblivious and happy. He always seemed to like the people Red brought into her life, she always wondered whether or not to trust his judgement.

It was a chill, damp day and Kaplan sent her over to the coffee cart when they got to the park, taking Hudson’s leash in her hand, and patting Elizabeth’s elbow lightly.

“I take coffee with milk,” she said, “And be sure to get something with plenty of sugar for yourself, dearie. Stress runs through fuel like anything.”

The radio was on at the coffee cart, and it was playing Christmas carols. She’d entirely forgotten, but it was only two short weeks until the holiday. Tom hadn’t even mentioned it, hadn’t even suggested they get a tree. It was like he’d suddenly stopped trying to play along in the charade, and she supposed that should make her nervous, but it seemed she had no nerves to spare. Whether or not Red was back by then, she was resolved she would not put herself through Christmas with her imposter husband. It was bad enough that it was the first one without Sam, this would be more than she could stand, this would break her.

“When do you think he will be back,” was the first thing she asked Kaplan when she sat beside her on the bench, and she supposed she was to be congratulated on holding out that long, although that wasn’t what she’d planned to say. She handed over Kaplan’s paper cup of coffee.

“You’re a canny girl. You’ve guessed what he’s up to, I think?”

“I have an idea, yes.”

“Then you know you can’t put a timeline on it, it will take what time it will take. But I know he is close to catching up to… the root of the problem.” She fixed Liz with a skeptical, piercing gaze that reminded her of the assessing looks her father would give her when he was sure she and Nick had been up to some mischief but didn’t yet know what, piercing and calculating. Liz tried not to squirm.

“He may not come to you right away, the very moment he is finished,” Kaplan warned, “He does what he needs to ensure his organization is sound, but he doesn’t enjoy these… projects. Especially if they become personal. It is sickening work. He may not want you to see him… the way he is when he gets back.”

“I hardly want him to see me in this state either, but we don’t get to worry about that anymore, not with the way things are. I won’t stay in place indefinitely. I won’t spend Christmas in that house, with that man.”

“I understand, dearie. I agree with you completely. And I believe things will move along more quickly than you think, now that we’ve begun. I’m glad you called me, now we can put contingencies in place.”

**

She didn’t prefer to think of Red as sickened by the grim facts of the life he lead, she thought of him often as an inhuman force, something imperturbable, something to rail against. If he felt what he did and did it anyway, what did that make him? Perhaps not a monstrous thing, a cold, unshakeable creature, but why then did he continue at all? Persisting on like a general in a war, an invisible war, a war below ground, for which he has given up everything. Why not just stop, why not just take his vast funds and go and be no more moved to violence and be no more sickened by it. What responsibility held him in this endless, horrible campaign?

He was not a man possessed of a mania, the way so many of the people on his list were. He was careful and he was unforgiving and she knew he harboured a deep vein of rage, but she was no longer willing to believe he was a man out for his own power and glory. They caught greedy men, eventually, and Red had never been caught. No, he had walked through the front door, purposeful and docile, for all that she had never doubted he could easily turn and snap and tear and burn them all. If given sufficient reason, he could make it happen, he might not even have to raise a hand but he could. And he hadn’t. And wouldn’t, he didn’t destroy without reason. And he looked at her sometimes with such tenderness, such gravity, no man with a pathological mind and a berserker heart could look at her that way. 

If she asked him, when he returned, about any of this, she could picture the blankness he would show her, the deflection. So many things he would not answer, though she’d begun to see after the investigation into the inclusion, it had something to do with what she would likely be asked in turn. Everything she had known had only made her interviewers look at her with harder, more suspicious eyes. She was beginning to see that if she wanted better answers she would have to trick him or force his hand, or find them for herself. And all of it was going to be a moot point if he _didn’t come back._

**

The team was packing up when they walked back through her front door, and the house looked untouched, just as well decorated and impersonal as it always had been. They met in the kitchen and debriefed. She was handed a flash drive of pictures from their search, a copy of a key that had been hidden in the base of a lamp and another that had been balanced on the trim over the little-used side door. He was careful, there wasn’t much to be found around the house, and Kaplan’s team had already been through the month before getting rid of the surveillance devices put in place by the unknown faction across the street. She’d been so relieved at the time and now she wished she’d known, might have kept them after all, they might have caught Tom doing… something. But they wouldn’t have, it wasn’t as though his persona included a physical mask to put on and off, and what ever vile things he did, he didn’t do them within the walls of the home he kept for his cover.

She did learn that Kaplan’s team, in the course of their investigation, had come into possession of that house across the way, and they were putting people in place over there to keep eyes on Tom. If he hadn’t noticed one batch of spies in the neighborhood, it seemed like little risk to bring in their own. She couldn’t help but picture, at hearing this, the building of a web, a slow moving, near invisible thing of strings and menace with Kaplan presiding over it, a very suitable Arachne. Many women built a web to snare a husband, but most intended to keep them, not to expose them and destroy them and banish them the way she meant to now. 

Kaplan patted her arm again and sent the team away out the back. “You know what to do if things take a turn,” she said, “I trust you will keep me informed.”

Then Liz was left alone again in her house, with the feeling like some subtle engine had come to life within her and around her, like finally she was underway.


	4. and I call to you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liz's leave is over and a familiar face returns.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took a little longer than I was hoping, but on the other hand, it's twice as long as I was expecting, so. I guess that evens out. I'm very much looking forward to seeing how this one is received, I definitely debated with myself about some things. Please do let me know... (this chapter is unbata'd, please forgive any remaining mistakes.)

_And all that we built_  
 _and all that we breathed,_  
 _and all that we spilt, or pulled up like weeds_  
 _is piled up in back;_  
 _it burns irrevocably._  
 _(we spoke up in turns,_  
 _'till the silence crept over me)_

_Bless you and I deeply do_  
 _no longer resolute, and I call to you._  
\-- Sadie, Joanna Newsom

**

The next day, Liz got up in the morning and washed and dressed in her work things and put on her makeup and it felt like putting on a costume. She didn’t entirely recognize the woman in the mirror, but it wasn’t the dark painted lips or the neatly styled hair, it was the coldness in her eyes, the flat watchfulness. She’s seen that in the faces of others who had worked the job too long, the ones that got pulled in too deep, but she didn’t expect to see it in her own face. It wasn’t the job that had done this to her though, nor could she blame Red, not this time. She had chosen the man she would marry, she had chosen the life she would live.

Tom was still getting ready as she left, she told him she was needed at work. “Something came up, I have to go in,” she told him, “I guess the vacation’s over.” She said lightly, and it was amazing how easy it had become in the last week, how casually she could lie to him now. How much satisfaction it gave her that she could, and did lie to him, that she could say almost anything and he would smile blandly down at her, expecting she was still his sweet and accommodating wife. He had no more idea who he’d truly married than she had, it seemed.

**

She walked into the blacksite like she was meant to be there and presented herself at Cooper’s office. He didn’t seem terribly happy to see her, but he didn’t send her away immediately.

“Have you heard from Reddington?” Cooper asked her first thing, right after offering her a seat.

“No, Sir, I haven’t,” she said, and it was easy to lie to him too. Red might have told her to tell the truth, but that was before the rest of it, before she realized about Tom, and there were no polygraphs here. She’d known for years and years how to look up at men with her big blue eyes and look blameless, it was hardly her fault if all of them were so eager to underestimate her so.

“Then what brings you here today, Agent Keen?” he asked, and it was this that nearly made her flinch, hearing her false husband’s false name spoken so easily, as if it were an everyday thing and not a mark of her failure.

“I need to be working, sir,” she said, stiffly and as respectfully as she could manage with the sudden trebbling pace of her heart, “I understand it’s a strange situation, and I’m aware I was hardly your choice for this team, but I do believe I have some skills to offer here. I guess what I’m asking, sir, is do I still have a job here or should I be requesting a transfer?”

Cooper looked her over carefully, with that stern, authoritative frown of his, and she wondered what he saw in her face because he seemed to soften, a matter of fact compassion in his eyes that surprised her. “I’ll be frank with you, Keen. You were not my first choice, no, and your inexperience means you’re still something of an unknown in my book. But I think you know how important this project is. None of us like Reddington, and I know it’s not what you pictured for your first assignment. But you’re our link to Reddington, like it or not, so if you request a transfer, I’m afraid it will be denied. At least until we have Reddington back, or he decides he is willing to work with someone else, you’re a part of this task force.”

“I understand, Sir,” she said, wondering if he was leading up to sending her home again, or about to tell her she was still under suspicion, because Cooper’s voice had a warning note.

“However,” Cooper continued, his tone lightening, “You have potential, Keen, and I don’t want to see it go to waste. Ressler’s going to be out for weeks yet, and the team’s still going through reorganization so I’m not going to be putting you on field duty. But as you insist, let’s put your skills to the test. I want you to work up a profile on Reddington. Go through the files, talk to Ressler, go over your case notes. You’ve actually met the man, so you should have it easier than the last guy. I want your report as soon as possible. And if any leads come up I believe I can approve your participation.”

A profile. On Red. She wondered why it had never occurred to her to attempt a real, extensive one before. Probably because she was too busy being dragged along in his wake, she supposed, but now the thought intrigued her. “I’ll start on it right away, Sir. And thank you.”

“Of course, Agent Keen.”

She rose and headed towards the door, eager to escape back to her office, but Cooper spoke again. 

“I still expect the best chance we have of finding Reddington is him getting in touch with you. If he makes contact, I want you to notify me immediately, day or night. And if you don’t you will have some hard questions to answer, do I make myself clear, Agent Keen?”

She glanced back, surprised by her lack of concern at this blatant threat, and nodded, “Perfectly clear, Sir.”

“Good.”

**

She sat in her office with the door shut and the blinds drawn, and thought out her next move. She had decided that she needed to be back in the Post Office, out of that house and back in with the resources of the FBI. She knew that she was still under suspicion, Cooper had just made it obvious that they still imagined they smelled Red’s taint on her, or suspected that she’d swallowed his corruption. She’d been too near him, and he’d been too eager to be near her, and what does a monster want with a girl, unless she is his pawn already or else he means to devour her and make her his own to use. If she were in their place she would suspect too, only it seemed to her now that these confining terms no longer fit them, or their situation. She couldn’t protest that to her superiors though, not without awakening even deeper suspicions.

She hadn’t expected it would be so easy to walk in and talk her way back to work, and now she had a new project on top of all her other worries which she strongly suspected was busy work to keep her out of the way. But she needed access to the files from Tom’s interrogation, and she was sure she could convince Aram to go poking through the life and background of Tom Keen. He had helped her look for Red, after all, and this seemed like a lesser infraction than going against the direct instructions from Fowler.

She hadn’t exactly planned on lying about her contact with Red, but she hadn’t actually planned on reporting it either. Maybe it was more old habit coming back to haunt her, keeping the prying eyes of the wider world from what was personal, what was family, what they wouldn’t understand, what they didn’t need to know. Maybe it was just that she couldn’t mention some of it without explaining all of it and she wasn’t ready to do that, she had to know what Tom was before trying to notify her superiors. She had to be sure she didn’t mean to take care of him herself until she did anything irreversible, set any phantom wheels of justice in motion.

But it wasn’t just that, she knew it wasn’t. She’s begun to realize that she had always viewed what was said between her and Red as neutral ground, untouchable, not for reports, not to be consumed and analyzed. No one but they need know how deeply they’d talked, how often. There were already enough assumptions made about what went on between them. It had been her instinct all along to downplay the importance of their conversations, and it seemed even more vital now, as though lines had been drawn, with she and Red on one side and everyone else on the other. 

She had noticed it overtaking her, somewhere in the back of her mind, but no matter how firmly she reminded herself about who he was, what he’d done, she’d found no way to stop it. He hadn’t even been in her life six months, but it had been time enough for the most terrific upheaval, and the most minute. It was a small sensation, quiet and so far within, but in the end tectonic, as if her thousand, thousand interior particles had slowly turned as one towards him. 

She was assailable by him in a way she had never been by anyone, vulnerable to his will as it pushed and pulled at her, where before she’d always been proud and dismayed by her capacity for indifference to the intentions of the men around her. But he could pull her along so easily, she’d had to fight so hard not to become entirely subsumed by his world, by his opaque and alarming plans for her. Only now she could see that the water had closed over her head long ago and she’d never felt it happen. And now he was the only fixed point she could see while everything else wove and swayed and turned to insubstantial spectres around her.

She’d fought so hard to keep him from knowing that he could pull her along in any way, at any time he’d wanted. She’d argued with him at every step of the way, trying to see if she made enough noise, dug in hard enough she might be able to halt this instinct to turn to Red, might stop him noticing that she always moved towards him in that half second before reason returned to her. She’d always looked after herself well enough, she’d always been self-contained, even as a young girl under Sam’s kind and bewildered care she’d been so independant, she’d always consulted herself before anyone else. But now every precedent had been overturned, and she found that she turned first to a man so unpredictable and dangerous he’d been hunted for years and never caught. Yet he’d hardly let her down, had he, the only one who hadn’t in recent years. And he’d stopped trying to command her so, as he’d done at first, as though there was already a rapport between them. He’d begun to settle back and observe her with weary patience and this intent curiosity, as though he wanted to everything about her, as though he didn’t already know. _But he didn’t know,_ she thought, _He doesn’t know who sent Tom, or what his real intention is. Is it possible he doesn’t really know me either?_

And now she was to dig into his life, and her interactions with him and create a profile, like he was any subject she came across at work. She was curious, she was more than curious, there was a sharpness to the way she needed to know who he was, what he was doing that worried her. But to write it up, turn it in, report her findings to her superiors, the idea of that felt shameful, like it would cheapen them both. She hoped he would be back before she’d finished her profile because she wasn’t sure she could go through with such a thing.

**

It was easy to convince Aram to help her out, although he looked her with enough sympathy to make her prickle with shame and defensiveness. She knew she had made a mistake with Tom, she knew what a mark against her it was going to be, once she reported him. She would be known as the woman who married one criminal and was willingly at the beck and call of another. 

Collecting the Reddington files was also an easy task, now that she’d been granted access. There were a lot of them, some fat with creased spines and overflowing pages. She wondered even as she spread them out on her desk just how accurate they were. It was a daunting amount of material, and yet it seemed so impersonal, as though these paper trails and third hand accounts couldn’t hope to define or contain or assess the man she’d met and spoken to, and been terrified and comforted by, argued with until they were both insensible with anger and raw nerves. Still, she’d been denied the chance to look most of it before, on grounds of her clearence level, her inexperience, and she suspected, more of that old same patronizing impulse of her superiors to keep her protected and ignorant of the worst that was tied to his name so she might be more willing to play the go-between, cater to Reddington’s wishes and theirs. But inspite of their obfuscation, she’d always known how she was pinned between these two powers, and she’d always been aware they both presented more danger than they wanted her to know.

**

She took the files, stuffed them into her briefcase like she’s not breaking several regulations in taking them, if she was caught out she would simply still her face and plead her rookie ignorance and say she didn’t think she could be doing any harm, just having them to look at. Thus armed with this ream of official paper, she took herself to see Ressler again.

He was out of the hospital now, she’d heard, she’d received a couple text messages about his progress from Meera, but he was far from recovered. She felt overwhelmingly awkward standing at the front door of her sometimes partner, sometimes detractor waiting to be let in. The last time she’d seen Ressler he’d warned her, told her not to follow Red out into the dark, not to chase him until she was gone too. She shifted the bag slung across her shoulders, filled with the classified record of the Reddington life story, and worried what he was going to read on her face when she asked about Red and the five year hunt.

A woman answered the door, a slender youngish woman with long, soft brown hair and a pleasant, open face, and Liz remembered that Ressler might go prodding and peering in the depths and the dark, but he was still one of the normal ones. He had a human heart, and institutional mind, he spent time with people who had open, smiling faces like the young woman who ushered her inside, offered her tea, introduced herself as ‘Don’s friend, Audrey.’

Ressler himself was camped out on the couch, dressed more casually than she’d ever seen him, leg in a brace and carefully propped up. They’d had to put the muscle back together, he explained, and he wasn’t supposed to move it very much yet. Audrey brought her a mug of herbal tea with honey, and one for Ressler that she handed over with a proprietary, comforting hand on his shoulder. She told Liz ‘not to keep Don talking too long’.

“The vicodin knocks him out,” she told Liz over Ressler’s embarrassed scowl, “He won’t take them if there’s anything interesting going on.” And then Audrey retreated deeper into the apartment, somewhere out of sight down the hall, though she suspected not out of earshot. She spent a few moments absorbing this, sipping her scalding mint tea and feeling herself at a great remove. She always had been the changeling child and always would be, she was more sure than ever that their kind of hearth-warm domesticity would always escape her, would always be something she couldn’t quite fathom or grasp or claim.

“Okay, Keen, what’s up?” asked Ressler when they were alone, “I’m guessing you didn’t come by for the sake of moral support.”

She set aside her mug and pulled her bag onto her lap. “Cooper asked me to write up a profile.” she said, taking in how he looked pale and pinched with discomfort he still looked, although far more alert than he’d been at the hospital. “On Red,” she added, as though they could possibly be talking about anyone else.

“You’ve been in touch with him, haven’t you,” he said, not a question but not quite an accusation. Maybe it was it was the pain meds, dulling his usual bite.

“Not since that first night,” she denied, meeting his eyes carefully and then looking away, “There haven’t been any leads. But then I was off work until today, so,” She shrugged.

“Really? Cause I gotta say, Keen. You look like hell for a person who’s been on leave.” He smiled the way her cousin Nick did when he used to tease her when they were kids, but she froze anyway, like a startled rabbit, trying to guess how much of her warp and weft was obviously and outwardly frayed for all to see.

“It hasn’t been a great vacation, no,” she said and looked down, pulling a file out of her bag at random.

“Sorry, that came out wrong. I just meant… they’re not still interrogating you, are they?”

“No. They’ve moved off me,” she said and opened a notebook on her knee, “Let’s get through some of this, shall we? Before your girlfriend kicks me out.”

“Don’t mind Audrey,” he said, a small content smile she’d never seen on him before taking over his face, “She’s just a bit over protective.”

**

So she interviewed him about Red, about his hunt for Red, about losing his trail over and over, how Red never seemed to be directly connected to anything when they needed to be able to make it stick to him. He told her what he knew of Red’s story, which was different than the official version, though that could perhaps be accounted for by the filter of entrenched antipathy through which he viewed Red. He talked about all the informants he’d tried to turn who were terrified of Red, and all the different interpol agents he’d met who would love to get their hands on him.

But then, the more he talked, the more he turned the topic instead to Audrey, how he had gotten caught up in the work and focused on the wrong things, lost sight of perspective, pushed past even Audrey’s apparently near saintly patience with his quest.

“This isn’t a job for happy people,” he told her, “It’s so easy to forget, if you’ve got something important you’ve got to hold onto it or it’ll just get washed away with all the rest.”

He wore himself out quickly, and Liz put away the files and the notepad and called Audrey back in, thanking them both for their time. She watched them for a moment or two before she showed herself out, their easy comfort, fussing over each other with care. _How do you do that,_ she wanted to ask them, _how do you love someone? How are you happy?_

The weather had changed in the scant hour she had spent in Ressler’s townhouse, the clouds had slunk in low and iron grey and begun to drop a heavy, creeping drizzle that seemed to cling against her skin. Some of the trees along the sidewalk were draped with white fairy lights, because it was almost Christmas after all, and something in her stilled and stuttered at the sight of those sweet, ordinary lights, over a horrible cold wellspring of sadness. She’d suddenly remembered again, as though she’d just woken up or turned around and found that her reality was still true, that Sam was still gone and was not putting up a tree and looking forward to her flying home for the holidays, that Tom was still a deadly stranger who would expect her to go through the motions. She hurried back to her car around strange gasping breaths like she was crying but not crying, for her eyes were always dry, had been since that small spate of weeping the day she had made her realization. When her hands had stilled and her breath had slowed she drove back to work.

**

The Reddington that Ressler described didn’t quite sound like the man she had met and yet it did, if she put aside how he was with her. The Reddington in the files was yet another shape, this time this one an ever shifting shadow that taunted and struck out at them, and yet she could see gaps in the reports, outlines left by redacted events that described ways in which various agencies had struck out at Red. And why wouldn’t they, she reminded herself, he was a wanted man, a notorious and infamous and unmerciful. But it didn’t settle easily with her now, the whole official story seemed to be muddied with competing male egos, his and theirs, and accounts that seemed to turn back on themselves.

It was the early years that most confused her. The narrative was clear up to a point, a steadfast, brilliant young man from a longtime Navy family who proved himself too useful in the field, too adept at intelligence work to let him move up the ladder and out of the field, as had originally been planned. From there the timeline degenerated into a mass of contradictions and impossibilities, filled with gaping holes and events that coincided and yet couldn’t have happened concurrently. At some of the crucial moments there were only pages of redacted black lines. She put all of it back into her bag, it was more than her over taxed mind could unravel that day.

She went home that even armed with a new abundance of information, the Reddington files and a flash drive full of things about Tom Keen slipped to her discretely by Aram as she headed out for the night. She couldn’t take them into the house, of course, but it was dark and raining heavily, it was easy to stop across the street and leave them with Kaplan’s people. There was a room over there, unused by the surveillance team, where she’s put most of her father’s things like a stock pile to keep her safe through the coming storms. She felt better knowing they were safe over there, though what immediate use they’d be she wasn’t sure.

**

Tom was waiting for her when she came in, his face so serious she was sure for a half-second he _knew_. But he put on his concerned frown, the one that always used to make her feel so guilty, and told her that he had a couple of job interviews in New York over the next couple of days, for nice, high paying private schools, and really it was for her own good, she could work at the field office up there, he could just tell the job was making her so miserable. 

She protested, and it was an automatic response, conditioned from too many times around the same argument. She was lucky, perhaps, in that. It was more convincing than any planned lie, although later she would disoriented about how easily she’d fallen into a pattern that should no longer apply to her and should no longer be instinctual.

“Just, just think about it okay, Liz?” Tom pleaded with a furrowed brow, and she didn’t have to fake any anger at his prodding, that came naturally too, “I’m taking the train up tonight, I’ll be back day after tomorrow. Promise me you’ll actually consider it, alright?”

She gave a shaky sigh and nodded, but he had already stopped paying attention to her, he was putting on his coat and gathering up his overnight bag and brushing past Hudson who had come it to watch the commotion. Liz rushed forward to hold Hudson’s collar, to be sure he didn’t follow Tom out the door as he still sometimes did and then found herself having to hold perfectly still while all her insides recoiled as Tom leaned over and gave her a kiss goodbye. She hoped he might attribute whatever strained look must be plain on her face to the reiteration of the argument that had dogged their relationship for months. He still believed he needed to continue his act and that, she knew, was proof enough of hers.

**

After Tom had gone she felt deflated, numb, too tired to feel relieved, but quiet and unthinking for the first time in days, weeks. She had a day at least, a little more, where she wouldn’t have to walk the knife’s edge of pretending and investigating, of trying to trying to present a relaxed and placid face and looking over her shoulder all the while. 

She sat in her dark kitchen, thinking vaguely that she should have kept the files with her after all, but the rain was persistent and grim and her body didn’t want respond to her call to action. And as much as it was necessary that she unravel Tom’s origins, she needed to stop thinking about it for a few hours. There would be no use it trying work tonight. She thought instead of pouring a glass of wine to celebrate the quiet and dark and her aloneness, but it seemed to be a bad trend to set, so simply sat back in the hard dining chair and listened as Hudson wandered over to his dish to eat his dinner and then wandered back to his big cushion to relax, listened to the house stand quiet and the rain beat lightly on the windows. This wouldn’t be her house for very much longer, she knew, one way or the other.

**

There was a noise from somewhere within the dim depths of the house, a footstep in the hall and a difference in the atmosphere as though she were no longer the only person there. She must have fallen into a light doze there at the table because she hadn’t heard the door open, but she was sure someone was there, someone moving. The gentle torpor was gone from her limbs the instant she heard it. Liz stood carefully and moved toward the sound.

“Tom?” she called out, having to be sure it wasn’t him back to catch her in the act of… something, but she was sure it wouldn’t be, “Who’s there?”

She stood in the wide door to her living room and there, with warm lamp light glowing behind him, hat gripped awkwardly in his hand, stood Red. He still wore his grey overcoat, the shoulders spattered with spots of rain, and his face was hard to read with the light behind him, but he looked still and wary, as though he was the one who was surprised to see her. She put her put her hand out to brace herself on the doorjamb, her breath seized with the sweet shock of seeing his silhouette in the middle of her familiar room. 

“Kaplan assures me he’s on a train to New York,” he said, and his voice sounded wrong, faint and formal and rough, but it was still definitely him, his voice, standing in her house, almost expectant, perhaps waiting for her to acknowledge him. He twitched his hat tightly in his hand, tapping it against his leg.

She had planned to keep her distance when he reappeared, to remain sure and aloof and let him know she felt strung along and toyed with. But she didn’t, she couldn’t.

She moved to him, driven by desperate impulse she couldn’t check, and there he was, solid under her hands, sturdy and hale and breathing. She had never thought to fling herself into his arms but here she was, reaching up to curl her hands around his shoulders, fingers scrabbling to find purchase on the plush, damp, heavy fabric of his coat. His arms at first were hesitant, he made a soft noise of protest or surprise as he reached up to steady her, then nearly crushing around her. She pressed her face into his coat collar and smelled fresh wet outside air and soap and smoke, and found that she was trembling as though there was nothing left holding her together and she made a helpless sort of noise she didn’t recognize.

“Sorry,” she said, muffled and into his shoulder which shifted slightly as she spoke, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t think I thought you were really coming back. Done with all this, too much trouble.” _And the last time I saw you, you were bleeding and and bound,_ she thought, _and I couldn’t stand that it might be the last I ever saw of you._ She huffed an embarrassed sort of laugh that came out more like another sound of despair and she had to hold her breath for a moment to try and undo the fluttering sound. 

“There was a time not long ago when you would have been relieved,” he said against her hair, and it was a poor imitation of his usual ironic tone, low and tired, but warm and close and so much richer than version she’d heard over the phone.

“Don’t,” she said, chastising his impulse to deflect, dismiss, “Not now.” She shifted so she could breath better, restless against him rather than comforted, as though she was still looking for him, and his hands didn’t sooth but clutch, one hand cupping the back of her skull, caught up in her hair and the other gripping her back so hard it almost hurt. She noticed then that he was wire-taut in her grasp and she pulled back to get a better look at his face, a sinking worry gathering in her. “Red? Is everything alright?”

He offered a little smile that was more of a wince and she wondered just what hellish journey he’d been on these last several weeks that he was so out of practice with her, just how much pain had he caused and been caused on his hunting trip. With that in mind, her certainty about what he’d been up to, this shouldn’t feel so easy, so necessary. 

“Yes,” he said, after a long pause, “There’s nothing here to worry use tonight.”

There was such a look on his face, such a raw look, and he was still so close, so that she had to look up at him. She could see there were smudges of exhaustion under his eyes, though he seemed unharmed. He was watching her so intently and his mouth wore a strange shape, longing, she thought, longing. He moved his hands to rest at her waist, slowly, so carefully, but his grip was firm, as though he was tracking the movement of her ribs as she breathed, his palms warm through the fine crepe of her blouse. 

“I don’t think that can be true,” she said almost at a whisper, wary of disturbing him or this new and clinging mood between them, “Everything’s fallen apart.” 

“Would you really have wanted to keep something so false?”

“No, of course not. Feel free to say ‘I told you so,’” she said, feeling defensive, drawing back from him on reflex, feeling a little over-exposed under the weight of his attention. She was perhaps a little out of practice at being in the same room with him. His fingers tightened at her sides for a second and then he let her go without protest as she stepped back.

“I’m hardly glad about this, Lizzy. I did want to be wrong about him when it first came to my attention. I wish that I had been,” he said and now that he stood two paces away he seemed once more unreachable, his tone frustrated and almost chiding.

“I don’t think I have to give you credit for that, you don’t get to make this about you too,” she snapped, prickling and defensive and wrong-footed. She watched as his face froze for a second before it smoothed, and regretted immediately how quickly their small comfort had dissolved. 

Red took another step back and settled on her couch, not looking exactly comfortable, but weary, his shoulders round as he leaned back. “Come sit with me, Lizzie,” he said gently, holding out his hand, more as a gesture than with any hope that she’d take it, but she did without thinking, and it was cool and dry and rough against hers. They were nice hands, she’d always thought, eloquent and capable and frequently restless, the movements of his fingers were always far more telling than the disciplined way he held his face. She let him draw her forward until she turned to sit beside him, stiff and carefull because she was still filled with that trembling but she managed to relax enough to curl one leg under herself so she could face him directly. This was supposed to be easier than over the phone, with more cues to read than from a staticky voice, but it was somehow so much harder. Red was sitting in her livingroom and he was just a man, in person, not the grand and capricious figure of the files she’d been reading all day. She had so much to tell him and so much to blame him for, but she couldn’t seem to say any of it because she was buzzing with nervous energy.

“I want you to listen to me,” he said gravely, shifting until he caught her gaze and held it, “You deserved so much better, so much more than this. You have every right to be angry. I know you’ve only suffered by your association with me. You should never have been put in this situation, you never would have been if your name hadn’t been tied to mine.” He sighed and reached out as if to touch her hand again, but hesitated, his arm falling back to his side. He settled back deeper into the cushions, shifting and down and looking away. He adjusted his coat as he moved, fidgeting and lost in a way she’d never seen. Everything about this night was making her feel like the world had gone over sideways. At last he continued, contemplative and as if he were looking back across some great distance, “You have been loved and protected in your life, so you expected love and protection from the man who said he wanted to be your husband. You couldn’t have known to look for something like this. You’ve done nothing wrong, Lizzy, you have nothing to be ashamed of.”

"Sometimes I wonder," she began, high and strained, somewhere between tears and fury and a morbid impulse to dig brutally at old wounds, and so far out in the wreck of it, "If Tom Keen was false, just a cipher, if he's just an act after all, was the woman who married him false too? Because I think she might be, Red. She tried so hard, she played along so well, she thought she was happy but… as soon she found out, she just disappeared, like she was just a figment, or a sham. I was so hurt… I was. I am. But. I was also just so, so relieved to stop being her."

Red was looking at her again, staring in his way that made her feel sure he could see every aspect of her, even those she didn’t know, and was giving her all his attention. “She is you, Lizzy, maybe not all of you, but she was still you,” he said very softly, very kindly, “And you were happy, I think, or you would have been more willing to believe me about him. Maybe there were doubts accruing in the back of your mind, but holding onto hope doesn’t make you dishonest. Please don’t believe this is some catastrophic death of self. You're grieving, isn’t that enough? You are so strong, Lizzy, so bright and bold, and so kind, to reach out to me even though you know what I…” he shook his head, “This won’t define you, do you hear me?”

He had leaned in close, and seemed to expect an actual response from her, but when she tried, something in her seemed to crumble instead. She found herself crying, and floating out in the wordless bleakness of it, because Red had said she was grieving so matter of factly, like he knew just what that was from the inside of it, and she realized she’d forgotten it was true and remembering was such an awful shock. She was grieving and she was barely coping and Red talked to her like he still thought she was sane and human, and for some reason she believed him, accepted it when she didn’t entirely believe it herself. And that made all of it worse, that made all of it real, pinned it to her skin, made it all a real thing that was happening in her life, immediately, inescapably. 

She pressed her hands to her face, curling in on herself, sobbing and trying to stifle herself. Red reached out to grip her shoulders, to try and gently gather her up but she pulled away. 

“How is that going to help?” she said wildly, wiping roughly at her eyes with the side of her hand, sure she could not be comforted. She was tired of crying already, and tired of Red seeing her cry, but had yet to figure out how to stop.

“Maybe it won’t, maybe it will only help me,” he said and she looked at him, startled, to see him give the saddest smile she’d ever seen, his thumb stroking gently against her shoulder bone. So she subsided and let him pull her against his side, still lost on the tide of sorrow. Red’s arm was tight around her, and he seemed to lean against her just as much as she leaned into him, and she realized what a foreign sensation that was, that the person _there with her was actually there with her,_ not simply accommodating her from a vacant distance. 

“You were right at first, this works better,” he murmured, almost to himself, resting his cheek against the crown of her head, and then more firmly, definitely, “We’re going to figure this out, Lizzy, you’re going to get get through this.”

“Are you lying to make me feel better?” she asked, reaching for the lapel of his coat as an anchor. 

“No.”

**

After some time, after her distress receded Liz found she was still sitting with Red, almost boneless, pressed to his side, in companionable silence. She felt calm, nearly buoyant in the aftermath of tears, solid again and nearly cleansed, except for the way her eyes still stung from salt and disturbed makeup, but finally some of that fear and worry had been bled away. She noticed that Red, too, seemed relaxed beside her, no longer taught and on edge. She shifted back a little so she could read his expression without craning her neck. 

“Hi,” she said with a wry smile, as though she was surprised to find him still there, “I’m guessing that wasn’t the reception you were expecting. I never used to be so…” she shook her head, not quite willing to say ‘out of control’ or ‘needy’ and those were the words that came to mind, though they didn’t quite fit. 

“Hmm. Perhaps not what I had expected, no,” he said, but his tone was far from disapproving.

“Are you actually back? Are you done with… I’ve been calling it a hunting trip in my head, you know. That’s what you were doing, right? Cleaning up? Exacting vengeance?”

“I was looking for the people who betrayed us, yes. I had to know who and I had to know why. But it was hardly the bloodbath you’re picturing, Lizzy. The faction who set Garrick on us was very efficient at cleaning up after themselves, there weren’t many… avenues left to follow. But I found my way back to the source eventually. The matter has been resolved, my house is clean, and I _am_ back. But your house is not clean, and we will have to proceed very carefully for the time being.”

“Do you mean Tom or do you mean the Bureau?”

“Both, I’m afraid. They will honor the agreement but there is still a mole within the ranks. I have yet to decide if it’s better to rout them out, or to let them think I am satisfied, leave them in place and keep them in mind for when I need my... detractor to believe I am acting in one way when I plan to act in another.”

She was surprised that he was so willing to actually share his strategy, but she had extracted a promise from him over the phone several days ago, that he would tell her everything. She had thought it just a gesture to placate her, but apparently he meant to keep his word. Apparently he trusted her to know things that weren’t, perhaps, for anyone else to know.

“So Garrick was set on us?” she asked, moving on to another line of thought before he changed his mind about his divulgent mood, “Who would do that? Does that have to do with Tom, too?”

“No, I’m certain it has nothing to do with him. We’re safe enough from that quarter, as it stands, now that the point has been made,” he said with a sort of finality she definitely recognized, it was almost a reassuring to hear him sounding as vague and portentous as she was used to, “As strange as it sounds, considering recent circumstances, they are by far the least of our concerns for the time being.”

Liz stood, unwilling to break through the sea-calm quietness that lingered in her by chasing down the details of those pronouncements just yet, the way she usually felt compelled to do. Instead she looked down at Red speculatively, and he tilted his chin up questioningly in response, as if to say ‘go on.’

“If I go and wash my face, will you still be here when I get back? Or will you have vanished into the aether?” she asked, half wry, half in all seriousness.

“Which would you prefer?” he asked, voice carefully neutral but there was a hint of challenge on his eyes.

“You should stay. We still have a lot to talk about.”

He nodded his acquiescence, so she slipped upstairs, turning the light on in the hall as she went, casting the house in a warm familiar glow. In the bathroom she tied back her hair washed all of her makeup and tear stains carefully away, until the steely but disheveled Agent Keen was gone from her mirror and only Liz remained, with her pale cheeks and solemn mouth and dark arched brows which she’d always felt stood out too starkly on her face. Then she stopped in her closet to take the little old snapshot out of her file box and put it into her pocket instead, and went back downstairs.


	5. in this waiting place

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few things... You may notice I tinkered with the events of "Good Samaritan" somewhat, and you may think I did this to make Red's actions more forgivable, but from the moment i watched the episode I thought that the writers had made a mistake in the amount of loose ends Fitch had left. He wouldn't still hold so much power in both worlds if he were really that careless! Second, the Dwane of the all night cafe is based slightly of a real person a friend works for, and he really does believe in all night establishments without signage (he also owns several houses around town all painted black) and he seems like the kind of old fashioned eccentric that would fit in Red's circle. Third, updates will most likely slow down from now as I head into a very physically demanding phase at work for the next month or so, but I will still be working on it as I find the time. This story speaks to me and I don't intend to let the life go out of it.

_Find me now a seashell_   
_to lift the water to my face._   
_The waves they are colliding_   
_and the springs and weighted winches_   
_are beginning to unwind._   
_In the air that’s brisk with turning I see what I might find_   
_in this waiting place that skirts along,_   
_outside the dragging hemline_   
_of the ticking of the world._

_\-- Between Times, E.T.I._

**

Raymond had been away for six weeks, only that short of time, and not so far from where he’d been for all that, but it might have been a year or it might have been a different world, down away in a fugue of anger and brutal machinations. It was not a foreign place, he visited often enough, he knew the custom and language of violence, of the hard ruthless search. But he had felt it this time, more closely, more viscerally than he had in years. He felt the press of his grief more than he felt the fury for retribution, his dear Luli, with her brilliant mind and sweet face, her calm, unswerving trust in him that had been repaid so poorly. She was yet another weight against him, another burden to carry always up the mountain.

He had not lied to Lizzy. He had gone searching for blood to spill, and found much of it spilled already by other hands, as Fitch’s men were practiced and merciless at leaving no end untied. Delores Kaplan had helped get him back on his feet, though that had taken enough time to worry him. He stood strong while Garrick and his doctor had worked him over, sent his mind away down the stations and corridors of his memory until he hardly noticed the hurts that were forced on him that day, but his body was slower and slower to recover as the years went on, and still his joints ached when he awoke in the morning in his cold bolt-hole. Then Kaplan had helped him track down and identify the bodies of those whose faces he’d seen in the attack, and where Garrick had held him, and he had worked backwards from there to see who had hired and paid them, who had tipped them off -- and most of those were dead men, too. 

But Newton had been his own, and his own to put an end to. His lost young self had been trained by his government to kill, but now he was a country and a law unto himself, and when weakened and encroached upon, could not afford to let his betrayer live and prosper. He could not let Luli’s death stand unpaid, with no matching tally on the side of his detractor, for it had always been blood for blood. That had been his first lesson, dealt out as he was stricken from the natural world, banished into the underground, where he had been expected to stay and wither, and sup from the river Lethe until he did not grieve, anaesthetised into harmlessness by loss. 

Newton had explained that his family had been threatened, that he had hoped Raymond would understand, given the open secret of his own past, his own family, and then Newton had shouted at him and spat such vitriol, that Raymond was selfish, arrogant, capricious, that he had deserved everything Garrick had put him through for getting Newton involved in any of it when he _knew_ he had a family, and he _knew_ they would be in danger. “You’ve never cared for anyone but yourself,” he’d said, “I expected them to take you and your empire apart and I was glad, and I would do it again. Now you’ll kill me but I don’t care because my family will be free.” 

And Newton had died by his hand, and he felt the horror of it every second, but he still took his life. He ended one more soul and thought that if there were any justice beyond that which he himself dispatched then he should also have been ended long ago. He made himself look at the body and remember him as the man he had thought ally and then he sat on the rocks and stared into the churning water where he had spread Luli’s ashes, sat until he was numbed and senseless and burned by the endless icy wind. It was a grim memorial for a dear friend, and he was the only living mourner, and he knew that in the end no justice had been achieved and no balance had been struck. Still, he was of the underworld, what was one more sin to stain him? He did not delude himself that it was a good death, he knew there was no such thing, but it was necessary and it was done.

Kaplan had come to take care of arrangements for Newton, and she had hectored him off the ground and into the waiting car and gave Dembe strict instructions to take him to his current hide away and keep him there until he had rested and was ready to return to the world. 

“Sit on him if you need to,” she told Dembe, who smiled and promised, and then she turned her sharp gaze back on Raymond, knowing he was hearing her again, not just the frigid winds of death and winter ringing in his ears, “That dear young woman is depending on you, Raymond. You’ve got to go and get sane for her, or all of this will have been for naught.”

And he had shrunk under her gaze, remembering as he’d hardly allowed himself to these last horrible weeks Lizzy’s lovely, trusting, intent face as he instructed her on her escape, her bold fighting spirit and her sweet, tender heart that she hardly seemed to know she must guard. She had called him, she had told him she finally understood about Tom, and she had cried, quietly as though she was trying to hide it, but he could hear it clearly and he could picture it -- he’d already made her cry often enough already that it was sickening. He’d pictured her hiding in her car with her beloved dog, and he’d almost, almost let the trail go cold and gone to her. But she had been in danger from Fitch’s attack, and that danger was not fully passed until the way was clear, and he knew that if he went to her, he would not be willing to leave her side and go back to this brutal business, not while her imposter husband still loomed large.

He had dreamed, when he found what little sleep he could those six weeks on the job, the old dream that always visited in times like those, the shambling specter of that Christmas Eve, sometimes nothing more than an endless walk deeper and deeper into the bleakness of a snowing winter’s wood at the end of the world. But he had also dreamed that the day of Fitch’s orchestrated attack had gone differently and despite the reassurance of his rational mind, he was eager to see Lizzy, distraught and perhaps alight with bracing fury with him, but whole and unharmed. 

It was a tall order, _get sane_ , but he knew what she meant, she knew all too well the kind of state he was in. It was time to climb back up and walk among humans, to put aside the battle campaign, call it hard fought if not exactly well won, and put on the amiable suit and the amiable face and make his return to civilization. 

**

He was washed and pressed and something like rested, if not refreshed, by the time he went to Lizzy’s house. Though, his mind was still making the slow walk up from the dim, ticking machine-state of strategy and retribution to the even footing of daily life. He should have waited, would have waited if he were a better man, for the storm to pass and the light of day, and for her to answer her own door and let him in. He was surer of his welcome with her than he’d ever been, though, and wished to see her at least, even if she slept, just to be sure she lived and breathed and still possessed her tender heart. 

So he let himself in, and found he was welcomed after all, was allowed to hold and comfort her, even if he still seemed unable to talk to her in a way that didn’t make her prickle with defensiveness. He’d held his hands at her sides and felt the movement of the bellows of her ribs and looked down into her lovely, pale upturned face, and she was flushed with distress and her brows quirked with confusion. But she had, after all, reached out to him and maybe finally something was built between them, some fine line of trust was finally strung, and maybe it would even hold when tested, as it soon would be. So recently he had ended lives with these same hands, with this same self, he was distantly astonished that she didn’t smell that death on him and recoil, didn’t send him from the drab but comfortable fastness of her home.

He realized as she talked, as she cried, that she was deeper in grief and bewilderment than even she realized. Too many blows had been dealt to her in quick succession, and as he drew her to his side, half resisting and half desperate for comfort, he wished there was some way she would allow him to whisk her off somewhere, to the safest, most opulent fortress he could find and keep her there, secure and untouchable until this war was over and all danger passed. It was impossible, of course, for so many reasons, practical and rational, not least because Lizzy meant to stand and fight, and would fend off even his aid if he encroached too far, if she felt her brilliance and autonomy at all impinged -- as she rightly should, he wouldn’t find her half so captivating if she were any other way. But still, he wished.

**

He was left alone downstairs for many long minutes as she left to clean herself up and perhaps unconsciously to regain a little distance between them. He had glanced briefly through the documentation of Kaplan’s search of the Keen household, but seeing it in person was a little different. He wondered whose taste it reflected, or if it was chosen out of a mutual delusion that was perhaps not so different than that engaged in by many young marrieds, a grab for the ideal of happy couples in modern furnishings. The Keens had no lack of funds to accomplish this, he himself had ensured that Lizzy would always have access to far more money than she probably realized, and ‘Tom Keen’ had claimed to be the sole inheritor of an estranged grandfather’s estate. Where that money actually came from was proving devilish to track down, and now he would never again benefit from Luli’s ability to seemingly divine these things with time enough and a computer. It was a nicely finished house in an affluent middle class neighborhood, it was probably very close to what Lizzy had looked at with longing as a young girl in her slightly unusual circumstances. 

But she would want to move on soon, he was certain. Her patience was not honed from hard experience as his was, and she would soon be driven to act. It was the least he could do to let her indicate the course they took over the coming weeks of investigation. His influence had sunk her into this mess, perhaps her impulses, unschooled and haphazard as they were, would be more auspicious. He would provide support, and he wouldn’t let his temper get the better of him, and they would discover the identity of whatever menace had set Tom on her simply to strike at him -- as if she were only some object caught in his orbit, as if she were unprotected.

Still there was only so much leeway he could afford her, only so much information he could give before she would act without understanding what she upset. His world worked by tenuous balances and alliances built on money and leverage, and if Lizzy had her way she would set out rattling all the cages at once, bringing the whole system down on their heads.

And Lizzy had padded back down to join him again, her face clean and her dark hair pulled sharply back, he knew now that it was silk-soft and fine and easy to tangle his fingers in and that was shockingly intimate knowledge to keep, and she seemed more compelling than ever, but uncertain. Perhaps she didn’t really know what to do with his continued presence here, but he wasn’t going to withdraw unless sent away, the danger was still too recent and his absence still too fresh for him to be willing to go so easily. 

 

**

When she came back downstairs, she found Red poking around in her kitchen, opening cabinets, seemingly unable to find whatever it was he was looking for. His grey coat was draped neatly over a chair at the dining table, and his suit jacket with it presumably, for he was now in shirtsleeves and waistcoat, and she ran a hand over it as she passed, unconsciously proprietary. 

“What are you doing?” She asked, almost hoping to catch him unawares, but he seemed unsurprised at the sound of her voice, though she was barefoot now, and moved quietly.

“At the moment, I’m wondering what you’ve been eating. You’ve nearly achieved the proverbial bare cupboard, as far as I can see,” he said thoughtfully, giving up his snooping and turning to face her.

“Peanut butter sandwiches mostly,” she answered drily, “And chinese takeout. Not together of course. And I honestly can’t stand the sight of either anymore. Tom always used to do the shopping but he hardly seems to bother anymore. Why are you…?”

“It’s very late, and I’ve been… traveling and you’ve been…” he frowned slightly, perhaps searching for a reasonably polite way to say ‘a total basket case’ and not coming up with anything satisfactory, he skimmed passed it, “I thought we might manage some kind of dinner, but--”

“Do you think that’s significant?” She cut in, realizing suddenly that she still hadn’t thought it all the way through, some things were still so habitual that she’d hardly considered them, “That he isn’t doing the shopping anymore? That he’s not playing along nearly as much? Do you think he’s getting ready to, I don’t know. Make some move? I didn’t even think. He keeps trying to get me to move away with him. I’m sure that must be part of some agenda but for the life of me I can’t see what. If he’s here to get a read on you, why would he want to move us away?”

She leaned a hip on the counter and watched him look abstractedly passed her and then down and away with that twitch in the side of his mouth as though she’d made him uncomfortable. She crossed her arms, feeling chilled and uncomfortable and alone, and in spite of her better judgement she wanted to be tucked into his side again and now that the storms of desperation had passed through her and left her, she could think of no way to ask for that again, and no reason why it should be acceptable. I’ve had that once and now I suppose I will crave it and I am strong enough to acknowledge that, she thought, but at least I’ve never been one to give in to cravings.

“Tom entered your life a long time before I… came to you, remember. I don’t think he was sent to gather intel on me, at least not at first. I don’t know why he would want to move you, but it worries me. Perhaps just to show me that he and his master can manipulate your life.”

“Well he can’t. It’s not like I was stupid enough to go along with him, you know. Even when I thought he was just my husband I wouldn’t go with him,” she took a breath and tried to decide how much she was willing to admit, and went on without deciding, picking up momentum, “This work is too important, and for once in my life I don’t feel like I’m preparing to be somewhere but _actually am somewhere_ even if it’s somewhere dark and hard where I never planned to be. So, I was never going to go with him. But you and Tom and whoever’s pulling his strings have got to stop treating me like I’m some kind of game piece, or just an extension of you, because I’m not, and I won’t be. I still don’t see where this idea even comes from, we weren’t anything to each other before your list.”

“I’m just guessing at his motives, Lizzy, I’m not agreeing with them. You were put in this position because you are important to me, but don’t mistake me. I know better than anyone that I have no claim on you and no rightful place in your life, nor should I, not if there is anything right still in this world. Now, will you please let me arrange for some food? It’s going to be a long night and I would rather we were thinking clearly.” 

He sounded tired and fed up, more dispirited and mortal than she’d ever heard him. She quelled the impulse to to tell him that he did have a place in her life, though he had carved it out himself with sheer insistence it was there, seemingly to stay, because she wasn’t willing to have him know that, yet. “I… Well, alright. I guess I haven’t eaten in a while,” she admitted. She was in fact terrifically hungry, she realized, she’d made no time for food all day, but she’d never actually shared a meal with Red and the idea surprised her. It was so intimate but also so mundane. Although he had invited her to dine with him often enough in the past, she’d always turned him down firmly, having decided that maintaining a distance was the most prudent option. Distance no longer seemed appealing, or even in any way rational or feasible. If their fates were to be tied together then the least she could do was allow him to feed her, on occasion.

In the end he arranged for a late dinner by way of one of Kaplan’s crew across the way, and after Kaplan told him off for using her surveillance team as errand boys she reassured them that she still had eyes on Tom, and he hadn’t as of yet been up to anything more sinister than travel and checking into accommodations.

“I don’t know whether I should be relieved or disappointed,” she said after he’d finished with Kaplan, “I shouldn’t wish for him to be doing harm, but this ‘not knowing what he’s up to and why’ is awful. We already know he’s behind one assassination and I hate to think that’s what’s behind all of his little trips for conferences and interviews. I’ve been so naive, haven’t I? What kind of fourth grade teacher needs to go to that many conferences?”

“There’s no reason to believe he was getting up to violet mischief in every absence. All of your husband’s actions up ‘till now speak to an intention to keep a low profile. It seems evident that he carried out an… errand or two for his master, but not frequently enough to draw notice. Chances are he’s meeting a handler of some sort, which is honestly the best we can hope for, at this point.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call him that,” she said quietly, watching as he began to poke about in her kitchen again. He set plates out on the counter, then cutlery, then wine glasses. Then he looked over at her curiously, asking for clarification.

“Don’t call him my husband. Tom Keen doesn’t really exist so I can’t really be married to him,” she said, and to forestall any sympathetic looks or unnecessary commentary she reached out and tapped one of the wine glasses lightly making it ring. “You’re not going to have much luck there, I’m afraid. Not unless whatever your friend’s sending over goes with whatever cheap white Tom bought last time he thought he would be cooking for us. I think that was the evening of our disastrous trip to the Syrian Embassy.”

“Lizzy…” he began uncertainly, probably unsure whether he was being blamed for something, whether or not she needed placating. He was frowning at her a little, looking definitely concerned. 

“No, really, that’s the best thing to come out of all this. I don’t have to feel guilty for any of those late nights any more. I intend to be completely hard-hearted about it. No more guilt. Not when I’m the injured party.” She set her jaw and waited for him to challenge her, to try and placate her, but he simply nodded his acknowledgement and began to set her table.

**

Their dinner arrived quickly, dropped off by one of Kaplan’s people, who sent with it the thumb drive of information about Tom she’d dropped off earlier. She had never doubted that Red had some acquaintance or other that would happily provide them a fine meal despite the fact it was after eleven, but she hadn’t expected the homey simplicity of the dishes he’d ordered. There was a hearty tomato soup that seemed best suited to being served in mugs, little, perfectly crisp panini with various fillings and a creamy, gourmand macaroni and cheese with crimini and pancetta, and a bottle of red wine apparently selected by the proprietor of the all night cafe and bistro.

“Dwane is quite the interesting man. He’s independently wealthy so his restaurants are a labour of love. They’re very popular in certain circles, although he insists on leaving the entrances unmarked and the telephone numbers unlisted. He operates by word of mouth alone. If we ever have the time, I’ll have to take you to one of his Sunday Dinner events, it’s as near to a religious experience as many of us may have on a Sabbath day. Although it leaves one needing another sabbath day or two to recover,” Red narrated steadily as he plated the food and opened the wine, keeping her distracted from the novelty of the situation.

Liz palmed the cork as he set it aside, to give herself something to fiddle with and was irrationally pleased when Red didn’t seem to notice. She’d always been proud of the tricks Sam had taught her. “This looks wonderful, but if eat very much of it I’m going to fall asleep,” she warned, accepting her glass of wine but not partaking just yet, “I haven’t been, lately. Luckily I’ve turned into an insomniac before since Tom’s known me, so he doesn’t think there’s anything suspicious about it.”

“Kaplan said her surveillance has followed him to a place in the warehouse district multiple times. It could be his base of operations,” he said and pulled out a chair, indicating she should sit, which she did, carefully and with a quirk of amusement that he seemed to be entertaining her as a guest in her own home.

“Yeah, that’s my guess. I told her I wanted to look into it personally, but there hasn’t been a good chance. Since he really is out of town, I’m going to look tomorrow, but I don’t want to even think about what I might find.” She met Red’s gaze as though challenging him to tell her to let him take care of it, or to say something meaningless and comforting, but he just nodded and took it as a cues to talk about other things during the meal.

It was a pleasant dinner. If one ignored all of the surrounding circumstances, it was perhaps the nicest evening she’d had in years. The food and wine was wonderful, and Red certainly knew how to keep the conversation going with surreal anecdotes that were largely dinner-table appropriate, although she always played more shocked than she actually was when they weren’t. It was amusing that even Red thought she had any midwestern sensibilities left to offend after her time working with cops in new york and making through the academy at Quanitico, so she kept up the pretence. Even his interest in her seemed genuine, not a condescension or a manipulation, but she was still unable to simply respond naturally and not counter with excavations into why he asked this question or that.

“I do enjoy sparring with you this way, Lizzy, there are very few who will, with me, and fewer who do it so well,” he said after one such round, “But perhaps you might try to believe from time to time that I don’t always have an ulterior motive, that I might just enjoy the company.”

That had pulled her up short, and she looked at him only to find his expression open and even, and she realized that yes, she really did believe him in that. She smiled wryly in self deprecation and toyed with the stem of her glass. “A lot of people never notice, I guess, but I’m almost as good at deflection as you are. Hazard of the training, always turn the question back around on the other guy,” she’s explained, which prompted him to ask about her schooling, and rather than trying to pin down just how much he knew already, and how he’d know it and why, she’d simply joked that her schooling had gone on for years in many different places so he’d have to be more specific.

But the surrounding concerns wouldn’t and didn’t stay ignored, they kept circling back around to batter and disrupt. She found herself wondering at odd moments what Tom was up to, or what she would find wherever it was he snuck away to, or wondering just what it was Red had been up to these last weeks. He might have been sitting with her, neatly dressed, at ease and conversing nicely, the way they were able to so easily when she remembered to let her guard down, but at odd moments she thought she saw the shadows of it shift in his face when he thought her attention was elsewhere. If she were a stronger person, she supposed she would press him on it, pry out the grisly tale and remind herself yet again of what he was capable. But she didn’t want to, and she wasn’t going to. The man who sat with her now was just as much a reality as the other. She wondered suddenly which of them was the man Sam had known. Perhaps it had been both.

**

They left the dinner dishes. She watched, amused and disbelieving as Red packed the leftovers, of which there were enough to last her another two meals at least, neatly into her mostly bare refrigerator. This was perhaps what he’d planned all along, ensuring she had something edible in the house for at least the next day or two, all without her completely noticing. She nodded to herself, agreeing to this, and took her wine glass into the other room, trusting him to come find her when he was done, and wrapped up in the fuzzy wool throw that had served as her bedding the last several days.

The second glass of wine had maybe been a mistake, she realized. She was drowsy and loose-limbed and warm and fed -- and protected, she acknowledged -- for the first time in what felt like years and it was a near-miraculous feeling. But she found herself near to dozing on her couch, while so much still felt undone. She was still expecting, had been expecting, something to be settled tonight, she’d thought it was about Tom but maybe she’d expected to come sort of conclusion about Red, or that between them they might enter into some pact or settle into some kind of agreement. And she still felt some striving, some expectation that was unsatisfied, that there had to be something said or done between them tonight, that would cement something, or prove something, though she couldn’t quite think what.

Eventually, not long but after several sleep-heavy, crawling minutes, there he stood over her, so that she had to tilt her head to look up at him. She blearily tried to read his expression in the dim room, and her befuddled mind could only tell her that such a warm look belonged to her Red, not the official one from the files and Ressler’s tale. 

“Sorry, I seem to be drifting -- I did warn you…” she said, and was surprised at the quality of her own voice, relaxed and fond.

“It’s perfectly alright, Lizzy, you need to rest,” he said softly, trying to wave her off as she rearranged herself to sit upright again, “I’ll just slip quietly out, shall I? We have time, nothing needs to be set in stone tonight.”

“No,” she said, “You don’t have to go yet. I’ve just been thinking, it’s like there’s something hanging over us. Not just your mysterious enemy, but something else. I don’t know… Red,” she asked at last, “How did they know to send Tom? I mean, how did they know to send anyone? I didn’t know you at all before, but obviously you’ve known of me. How could I possibly be important enough to you to be worth all this… cloak and dagger plotting and spying?”

“Lizzy… that’s not an easy thing to answer,” he said, taking a few steps back and sinking into the chair opposite her, “And I don’t know that now is the right time to have that conversation.”

“Yes, I think this is exactly the right time,” she countered, finding herself fully awake again, and yet in an almost dreamlike state, feeling suddenly completely certain that if she pressed tonight, he would answer, “We’re in this together either way, at least while we get this all cleared up with Tom, so I think I have a right to know. I’m not looking for the whole answer tonight, okay, I don’t think I’d even be able to take it in right now if you were willing to tell it. I just want to know why the hell you picked me, of all people. Is it because of Sam?”

“Sam? No, not exactly,” he said and looked away from her as he decided how to proceed. She could see his mouth work slightly as he chewed the inside of his cheek, trying to choose his words. He leaned forward to catch her eye, his elbows braced on his knees, “I can’t tell you any of the surrounding details, not without risking your safety, but I happened to be in a position to help you, and another person, a very long time ago, in another lifetime. My actions had far greater consequences than I realized at the time, but even so… I’m ashamed to say, I began to think of you as a sort of… accomplishment. I had done one good thing in keeping you safe, and that still counted for something despite the filth and violence I immersed myself in later, despite the path my life took. And if you still flourished somewhere then I could never fully regret what my actions had wrought. Sam was… a very old friend of mine, as I think you’ve realized, and I would check in from time to time, make sure that you were well. It turns out to have been a much more open secret then I realized, and now you’ve got to deal with the consequences. I know how this sounds, believe me,” his gaze dropped, as though he truly was ashamed, his mouth quirked with regret and she wished it wouldn’t, it made him seem too vulnerable, she had to clench her fingers in her wooly blanket to prevent herself from reaching out in some way. 

But he was right, it did sound bad, it sounded selfish and possessive. Quite recently she would gladly have accused him of those very things, but now it didn’t quite sit right with her, somehow. She had no idea how to respond.

“Now that I’ve met you,” he continued lowly, still looking slightly away, his voice lacking his usual assurance, “I’ve realized how arrogant it was to think that I knew you, that in many ways I’ve done you a disservice in not bowing out when the time was right a very long time ago, but I’ve also realized… I still can’t regret it. I’m glad I’ve had this chance to get to know you.”

“Well,” she said, feeling a curl of something warm, inchoate but vital and brilliant solidify within her, “I know it sounds crazy, but I suppose I don’t regret it either.”

His head snapped up at that, and she looked at him steadily with a faint smile, and yes, this is what they had needed to settle. She could see a look bloom on his face of surprise, almost wonder, like she had just performed a remarkable feat, and she felt maybe she had, maybe she had finally realized that whatever the circumstances were that brought them here, it was so important, almost wondrous, that they were able to speak, that he could see her just as she was and she could see him just as clearly. A pact had already been made, she realized, she had only needed to acknowledge it was there.

**

She showed him out a short while later, there was not much else to be safely said, and she felt almost in a daze, but it was a feeling of lightness, not the fog of desperation she’d been in. She watched carefully from the hallway as Red slipped back into his suit jacket and overcoat with sharp, easy movements and trailed behind him as he went to retrieve his hat from where he’d balanced it on the newel post and set it on his head with a practiced adjustment. These motions seemed so essentially _Red_ to her now, almost ritualized, it was suddenly fascinating, reassuring to her. 

He stood in front of her door, in her dim front hall, seemingly hesitant to leave. “I’ll contact you tomorrow, in an official capacity. The best way to create the pretense of working on a case is to actually be working on a case, and I had better make my presence known among your colleagues,” he said.

“Alright. Did you want to be there when I go check out the place Tom’s been going?”

“Yes,” he said simply.

She opened the door and they shuffled out onto her stoop. It was still raining but not with the perverse vigor of earlier in the night, she shivered slightly in the chill and damp. “Okay,” she said, and realized wanted to make something clear before he went, “You should know, the things we talk about… They don’t need to know, I don’t report it. I didn’t when they were investigating the incursion and I won’t now.” _It’s personal,_ she thought, _It’s ours,_ but wasn’t willing to phrase it that way out loud.

“I know, Lizzy,” he said and reached out and took her hand briefly, his fingers sliding along her wrist, gripping her palm, gone almost before she had a chance to grip back, “Go and get some rest, alright?”

“Yeah,” she said, “You, too.”

And he turned and walked down the stairs and out into the night. She watched for a few moments from the shelter of her doorway and then turned too, went inside and bolted the door against unwelcome intruders now that the welcome one had gone.

She put out the lights downstairs, she’d always thought of it as letting the house go to sleep for the night, and padded back up the stairs, running her finger along the edge of the picture in her pocket. She would sleep in her own bed for once, unobserved and free to breathe easily, and tomorrow she would begin again, with some traction, with some hope.


	6. you might keep me, and not fault me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as unbelievable as it may seem, I have another chapter for you already. I'm working away at this story like a mad thing because it's the only thing keeping me from breaking in the face of some pretty intense tensions at work, a heat wave (and an un-climate controlled studio) and The Cold That Will Never Go Entirely Away... But I am basically petrified about this chapter and I really really hope you will tell me what you think of it!
> 
> One small thing, I've messed with the timeline again, putting an AU version of 1.14 Madeline Pratt *before* 1.09/10 Anslo Garrick. Because Of Reasons. (also, I gave her a different red dress because the other one looked cheap and fitted poorly, the one i'm picturing for Liz is similar in style to the camisole-bodiced, chiffon-skirted, floor length red thing from the Elie Saab spring 2014 collection i saw on a photoset on tumblr, if that's the kind of thing that matters to you.)

_I would walk with you, arm in arm and_  
 _lean against your shoulder, thus,_  
 _and know the feel of those mundane and nourishing sensations,_  
 _coat sleeves, warm-firm flesh, hard elbow, solid shoulder bone._  
 _If you might hold me, I would tell you,_  
 _speak into your coat collar and_  
 _tell you anything, all things,_  
 _(...)you might keep me_  
 _and not fault me for the pressed leaf_  
 _of girlhood that I carry,_  
 _if I could speak to you this way,_  
 _if you could see past the measured temperament of your mid-less heart,_  
 _see me as a bold and quaking thing._  
 _We could be happy._  
 _We might._

_\-- My Egg of Longing_

**

Liz lay alone in her bed and dreamt that she was not alone. Earlier that night she had felt Red’s hands on her, she had leaned in and invited his embrace and had hardly noticed it in the wretched and overwhelming seas of her fears and worries, but her body remembered better than her conscious mind. That small touch had started something in her ringing like the slow, bone deep singing of a tibetan bell rubbed round and round, and it rung and sang and disordered as she slept. She would never know if it was the beginning, or if it was in fact the final set of tumblers falling into place, or something long bound and buried being loosed, at long last.

He’d always been careful with her, he’d always kept a strict distance, near enough to be in her space, to display to onlookers that she was of his, she was to be regarded as under his protection. At first it had alarmed her, he’d seemed looming and possessive, though in truth he was not so very much taller than she, not the most obviously imposing figure in purely objective terms, not that it was possible to view him objectively for more than a few seconds together. She’d understood very quickly, though, how necessary it was to present a united front to whomever among his acquaintances or enemies or allies they came to meet. 

And honestly those three states seemed interchangeable, what was ally one day might still be enemy tomorrow, no one was ever to be granted too much trust, too much real knowledge that might later be turned against him. No one but she it seemed, she had not seen for months just how remarkable it was that he had brought her immediately to stand with him in his inner circle, and closer than that. She had attacked him and she had borne his prodding and his subtle anger that she had not immediately greeted him as friend, she had insulted him and railed at him all within the earliest days of their alliance and somehow that had cemented his devotion. Somehow that had prompted him to bring her nearer than he seemed to bring anyone, even those he’d known for years. 

But still, in plainest physical terms, he had kept his distance.

**

Just a few short weeks before the Garrick Incursion Red had sent her on an errand to retrieve an absurdly valuable piece of statuary containing absurdly sensitive information from the Syrian Embassy, and coincidentally get back at a former paramour of his. It had been a surreal couple of days. He’d taken her to meet the woman, Madeline, expecting her to do a cold read with no more instruction than he’d let it be understood that she was “his pet thief” and proceeded to give her next to no help through the interview. Madeline was beautiful, assured, she may have been on the grift but everything about her spoke of grace and money and Liz had felt awkward and shabby as Madeline and Red had auditioned her for her part.

The case, such as it was proceeded to throw her life into uproar, rushing around to get her in with Madeline, fighting with Tom about her work hours and the potential adoption, arguing with Red about his presumption in getting her involved in a heist of all things, and about whether or not it was inappropriate of him to buy her a dress for the event because he was sure there was no black-tie appropriate attire hiding in the back of her closet. It was also the most time she’d spent with Red up to that point, building a plan with just him, not the whole team, conferring in low tones in his borrowed mansion in between bouts of flaring temper. 

He’d insisted about the dress on in the end, siting the undeniable need for verisimilitude in a glittering, watchful crowd. She’d had to take it home in a garment bag and fit herself into it in front of her skeptical husband, she’d even had to get Tom to help her with the tiny catch at the top of the zipper as he joked about the government’s under-cover budget stretching to some really classy fashion these days. It was in fact a wondrous thing of plummy claret silk, somewhat inspired by 50s party dresses or ballerina’s costumes, but slimmed down and sleek and daringly low in the back with the thinnest straps over her shoulders that seemed to be there for effect rather than to be relied on to keep the bodice in place. It was fitted tightly enough through the ribs that she was worried about breathing properly in the event a swift escape was needed, and there was an awful lot of soft, fine, infinitely snaggable chiffon in the skirt that would make a grand entrance but seemed likely to trip her up in a tight spot. She would spend the night reminding herself not to give herself away by grabbing up fistfuls of the slippery, floating stuff in fidgeting hands, setting in permanent, obvious creases.

She could hardly stand to look at herself in the mirror all put together that night, in all her unaccustomed finery. He’d sent along jewelry as well, that she hoped Tom hadn’t noticed because it couldn’t be easily explained, a matched set of antique, carved emerald jade and warm gold to settle against her collarbone and dangle around her wrist where it would distract from the scar, and fine little drops for her ears. They were delicate and understated pieces, suited for a young woman, not the showy things worn by affluent married ladies, but they would speak of old money to those who knew their value, which would help sell her cover as rich, naive ingenue Red had attached himself to for some reason. She wasn’t sure what to make of the message Red was sending, if it was really just the part for the night, or if he was trying to entice her with unaccustomed baubles, or if he wished she might be more like this poised, lovely woman who appeared in the looking glass and not the furious, striding, unbending creature who confronted him in daily life. She wasn’t sure if she was being complimented or insulted. She did know the dress fit perfectly. She left the house that night flushed and giddy with nerves and the force of his attention, which she felt though he wasn’t even there.

But the night had been a disaster nearly from the start. She’s entered on Red’s arm, and didn’t freeze while the guard approached them to check her bag and Red waved him off, though he teased her later that she’d left bruises she’d been gripping his forearm so tightly, and that was the last good moment. Every comment from Red left her more on edge, even when it was meant to reassure. When she proved an awkward companion who struggled to make small talk with the fellow guests, he goaded her out onto the dance floor and tried to convince her to relax while keeping her at such a decorous distance, with such a light touch that he seemed to be using manners from another century. Somehow as they danced, she had caught the eye of Madeline Pratt who was watching from beyond the dance floor with such a knowing, condescending smile that Liz stumbled and nearly fell off her low, sensible heels. And later, as she’d slipped away to try and crack a safe that had proved empty, she caught sight of him dancing with Madeline, close and naturally and intimate, their history obvious for all to see.

She thought that might have been the most humiliating moment of the night, out there on the dance floor with Madeline smirking at her and Red acting like he could barely deign to touch her, and not later having giggle and wriggle and babble at the guard who caught her -- and liked the sight of her perfectly framed decolletage as he tried to catch hold of her far better than Red had seemed to -- until she had the man confused enough that she could break free and subdue him. 

She’d met up with Red who was speeding down the back stairs leaving his own trail of disabled guards and he’d towed her out an emergency exit with a hard grip on her arm like she was an errant child and she’d shouted at him all the way home in the car about putting her in such a preposterous situation, not to mention tipping her hand about certain of her skills without her permission in a kind of mania of anger and unspent adrenaline. Then she had fumbled her way through unclasping her borrowed jewelry with shaking hands and dropped the handful of it into his lap, just barely resisting pitching it at him, snarling that he should, “Find someone else to play your dress up games with from now on.” 

Through all that he’d sat, frowning and impervious, refusing to even acknowledge her tantrum. He’d bid her a rather chilly goodnight and she had been all to happy to quit his company and put the whole event behind her. 

It was really no wonder he’d flinched, weeks later, when she’d mentioned that night quite casually as though it hadn’t been a spectacular low point between them.

Later, after she’d taken off her fine dress and put it carefully in it’s bag, for reasons she hadn’t really understood at the time, she had pulled Tom away from his drowsy viewing of old sitcoms and taken him to bed. She’d been insistent in a way she never was, trying to prod him not to be so gentle with her for once, to touch her as if he actually meant it, as if he had ever harboured any passion or possessiveness for her, and he’d looked at her strangely in the dark, at arm’s length, trying to figure out what had gotten into her. It was an awkward encounter, as though she had something prove and it went unproven, and even if her body’s needs were met her mind was left more unsettled than ever. It turned out, in the end, to be the last time she would intimate with her husband. Even before she knew what he really was, that didn’t disappoint her.

**

Liz dreamt that night of simple touch, of Red’s arms around her, as they had been and as they had not been, more tender, more dear. She awoke into a feeling she didn’t recognize, almost didn’t recognize but did, as though that frictive, singing ring had settled under skin and rearranged her thoughts, her senses as she slept. It was not a soft sort of feeling, not glad and affectionate, it gripped and it pulled and seemed to force her chest open with a kind of tenderness that bit. It also wasn’t entirely new, as though it had slumbered in the back of her mind for some time without her being fully aware of it, only now it walked abroad in her conscious self and made itself known, and would not be ignored. 

Oh, she thought, with a hand come up to press at her sternum as though it might reorder, resettle the sensation within, _Oh,_ and, _I have been so stupid haven’t I,_ and, _Now I’ll have to carry this, too, on top of everything else._

And she rolled over and put her face into her pillow and told herself it was just chance and trickery made up of dreams and comfort and in any case she had always been good at putting aside what she didn’t want and packing it away. But the feeling didn’t fold itself up and disappear, it stayed. Inside, she continued to ring. She got up.

**

Red duly made contact with a location and a time, and his tone was perfectly businesslike -- in a reverse to what she had expected, her nerves settled to hear his voice, the old distance didn’t even bother her, it meant nothing catastrophic had been done. She responded quite sanely, pleased to hear the clear, strong note of her voice, and agreed to his location. Then she contacted Cooper and let him know that Red had been in touch, that he was back and meant to give them a name, as though none of the previous night had happened and it was just that hour he had called her. She was finding with practice, lying to her boss didn’t sting in the slightest, or even give her a moment’s pause.

The rain had cleared overnight and a bold winter sun lit the stained windows of the fine Synagogue where Red had chosen to meet. Everything seemed to be pale golden light and dark carved wood, and she felt moved by the grand, reverential air of the place even though she kept no faith or spirituality in her heart -- it was a nearly impossible impulse to manufacture if you hadn’t been raised with faith, and she had not been, and had long accepted that her spirit embrace did not belief in that way. It was warm inside, and stuffy with faint, lingering perfume and the indefinable, warm-dust smell of dry old buildings. Red was in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat again and she wondered how long he’d been here waiting for her, whether he’d come here because it was a place of worship or because it was a place of sanctuary that only the most depraved would fail to respect, whether he covered his head out of respect or reverence. 

She also wondered if he realized that the light where he sat by the cloudy window set off his eyes to their best advantage, making them brilliant and green, and casting his elegant features with a warm glow that made him look almost regal. She couldn’t hold his gaze, felt overheated in her heavy wool coat. She fiddled with the edge of her cuff and looked away.

They had the place mostly to themselves, as it was a weekday morning, but the acoustics of the Synagogue made their voices carry. The sound was resonant and reverberant, and it meant they had to speak very softly and lean very close to keep their conversation private, and she felt her heart beating practically in her throat as she leaned into his space.

“Our man calls himself the Alchemist, though it is a particularly perverse corruption of the term. He believes himself untouchable and occult, and it’s true he’s discovered some very unusual techniques, but he’s just another figure scrabbling around in the dark, making his money off those who have done the worst and will go to any lengths to avoid being caught. He sells it as sort of transfiguration, he makes the world think his customers have died in some unforeseen accident while they slip quietly away never to be heard from again. This self styled illusionist facilitates the escape the guilty with the slaughter of innocents to be left in their place. It’s always amazed me the way the sort of people who go to him always justify themselves by imagining that they will live a better life after they’re out of reach of the long arm of the law or whatever vendetta sent them running, but they never do, I’ve found. No matter how far they run, there are always the old same temptations, and will go back to getting into the same kind of trouble as soon as they settle in.”

“But it doesn’t work like that anymore. You can’t just stage a death and substitute one corpse for another, there’s dental records and DNA testing, you can’t just get around that.”

“He’s counting on that. He knows how you lawmen work, and he knows DNA is given as final proof. But he’s found some way of manufacturing synthetic DNA to fool the standard tests. Don’t ask me how it works, organic chemistry was never my strong suit, but he does it. I’ve heard word he’s based near here these days, and he’s supposed to be making a certain high ranking lieutenant in the Russian Mob and his wife disappear as we speak. I think it’s time we put a stop to him.”

“How do you know?” she asked and found that she was staring at him again, and tried to redirect her attention.

“Hmm?”

“How do you know what he’s working on, the Russian mob guy and his wife?”

“They approached me first. I turned him down. That kind of work doesn’t interest me anymore, and I’ve burned a few bridges with the Russians, so I didn’t feel the need to bow to any unenforceable threats.”

“Right. So I suppose I should ask if you’re taking this guy down to get rid of the competition, but you’d never admit it if you were, so I won’t,” she said uncomfortably and tried for a wry smile in his direction. She found she didn’t much like such stark reminders of his connections, not now, not when she’d just realized that he was the only person she trusted, the only person whose company she longed to keep.

“I haven’t done that kind of work in a long time, Lizzy, at least not for the undeserving, and I never was what the alchemist is,” he said, settling back from her just slightly, “His disregard for innocent life is abhorrent and as we have the means to stop him, we will.”

“How is this going to work anyway? Cooper’s expecting you to show your face a the blacksite, but what about the leak? What, exactly, constitutes ‘being very careful’?”

“It means we’re back at the beginning again, I speak with you and you alone until I see the lay of the land. But that’s not such a hardship, is it,” he reached out and ran his fingertips along the back of her hand where it rested in her lap and her breath jumped and she looked up to find him smiling gently from so close by, “I think we’re working very well together, these days.”

“We’re making progress, anyway,” she said, sounding a little strained, knowing she was leaning into his attention, but not really minding.

“Are you alright, Lizzy? You seem a little…” he shrugged slightly, tilting his head at her inquisitively, an endearing little frown between his brows.

“I’m alright. Just thinking ahead to what happens next, I guess,” she said, and it was at least mostly true, “I have both of the keys we found with me, and if neither of those get us in, I suppose you have other ways.”

“Are you ready to do this?”

“Not really, but I think we’d better get it over with,” she said, and reached for the two little keys in her pocket to be sure they were still there, as she’d done half a dozen times already that morning.

She watched from her place on the bench as Red slid back into his outer things. He extended a hand to help her up, unnecessarily but she took it just the same. Perhaps he felt as compelled as she did to reach out, to keep reaching out, now that the ice was broken between them, now that she had reached out to him first. She walked out of Temple close beside him, terrifically aware of every time her coat sleeve brushed his.

**

‘What happens next’ was the trip out to investigate Tom’s little unknown hideaway in an industrial part of town. It was a deserted area in a bad neighborhood, so they didn’t have to worry about anybody calling the cops if they were observed breaking in. Liz checked the building in front of her against the picture on her phone sent to her by Kaplan’s team, and it was definitely the same place, same address, everything. Red stood by, watching impassively from a polite distance as she had her staredown with the unmarked door. She tried one key and then the other, and the second one opened the lock easily. She glanced over at Red uncertainly as she tried the handle and he strode over, putting a hand to her shoulder to halt her and indicating wordlessly that he should enter first. Any other day she would have forced the issue out of sheer pride, but she didn’t mind putting off looking into her husband’s lair for an extra few seconds and she knew that Red didn’t take her safety lightly, even if the risk was slight.

It was a grim, dank, hard cement place, lit unevenly with tiny windows high up and a few fluorescent lights. It wasn’t a place she could imagine spending any length of time. She had always pictured Tom in his classroom, before, with the kids and the display boards covered with coloured butcher’s paper and his desk with the little parade of cartoon figurines she’d bought him once to give him street cred with the students. She hadn’t realized that she’d still kept that image, in some backward corner of her mind, until it vanished, replaced with a vision of him holed up in this evil bunker. 

There was a table with a computer and a litter of papers, with a standard desk chair and little space heater tucked underneath. There was a stockpile of weapons and unmarked cases set up in shelves in the corner. There was a little refrigerator plugged in and humming blandly on one wall. This place had taken time to plan and put together, and was made for regular use. Worst of all was the enormous whiteboard covered with pictures and notations and scraps of paper, the kind kept by the crazed stalker and the conspiracy theorist in movies. Most of the board was her, and Red, and Red’s team, mapped out indifferently with magnets and string. She felt cold all over, a horrible, horrible cold and she stalked towards it, though she wanted to retreat, the way you approach a dead, mutilated thing, knowing it won’t leap out to attack but knowing the sight of it will harm you just the same.

“My god,” she breathed, hardly knowing she spoke, “What _is_ he? Why would he do this?”

Suddenly, Red was there, by her side, his hand pressed firmly to the small of her back, distracting her just enough from what she saw that she could turn away. She looked around her once more, realizing that it was a large space, and the electricity was on, someone must be renting it, paying for the utilities.

“It’s harder,” he said, “when you have all the evidence right in front of you.”

She nodded slowly, frowning, leaning into his side very slightly. “I don’t know how I’m going to go back to pretending when he comes back tomorrow night, now that I’ve seen this. This isn’t sane. This isn’t something I can live with.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, so quiet, so remorseful, “Maybe he’s met with his handler in New York, that would give us something to work from. I’ll get the report tonight. This won’t continue for much longer, I promise you.”

“You’ve said that before,” she said grimly, “But it doesn’t seem like we’re making any progress.”

“Lizzy…”

“No, I know. This is important. I can stick it out a while longer,” she said, cutting off whatever cajoling words he could find in this mire. She could see the pained look on his face and knew he couldn’t like the situation any better than she did. Another thought struck her then, about the eventual path of this thing, provided she ever made it out the other side. 

“And when this is done? When Tom and his employer are unmasked and dealt with, what then? That’s what you came here for right? The list was incentive for us, but you came here to get close to me and pry Tom loose, right? What happens after that, do you just disappear?” she said, turning to face him directly, to watch his face close up to keep her out.

He seemed to flinch at her words, his jaw softening in surprise, and he drew away, withdrawing his touch. _It’s impossible,_ she thought, _it’s all too impossible._ She knew he wasn’t going to answer, that she’s shocked him by seeing through his motives and stating it such bold terms.

“Dealing with his employer may be a more complicated project than you make it sound,” he said instead, sliding his hands into his pockets. “I’m going to call in Kaplan’s people to document this place and put it back together, he’ll never know we were here.”

“Right. Of course. You’ve had them waiting around the corner this whole time, haven’t you?”

He smiled inscrutably and made the call. 

**

Liz brought the Alchemist case to the team, who were still greatly subdued by recent events but eager to sink their teeth into something new. The mafia man and his wife had already been disappeared, it was too late to save the poor souls tricked into taking their place in a staged plane crash, but they had a place to start. She hoped that Cooper would just quietly forget the profile on Red he had assigned her, the man himself was back now so it hardly seemed necessary, and she was sure that whatever report she produced on him would certainly give her away.

It was nice to work closely with Meera Malik for once. With Ressler still out Meera was taking point on the trip to pick up the wayward Russian. Meera was deeply skeptical of the synthetic DNA theory, “It sounds like science fiction,” she said, frowning into her untasted drink, “DNA is DNA, and if it isn’t anymore, then we’re all screwed. We’ll never make another conviction again, it’ll all be just be one massive bloody shadow of a doubt for the defence.”

But of course Red was right, and they got their mobster and dragged him back home.

**

It was a long tense drive back from Tom’s bunker back to her car. She was completely at a loss, whatever peace she’d felt the night before was long gone and she stared out her window at the creeping traffic to save herself from spending even more time staring at Red’s profile as he remained impassive.

Sensing the mood, or perhaps needing the break himself, Red began to talk about the Hermetic philosophers and occultists of medieval Europe and the alchemists on the late 16th century. Most of it flew over her head in a jumble of tangents and greek sounding code names and she wondered how he came to know all this trivia.

“History hasn’t been kind to the alchemists, it has turned their quest for transmutation into some twisted vision of gold fever and greed, painted them as fools looking for the elixir to give them eternal life. They got everything wrong of course, every single assumption they made about the universe and the properties of matter were false, but they were risking life and limb and the persecution of a vindictive and powerful Church to carry on their experiments. Their chemicals drove them mad and their furnaces tended to explode in their faces. But they were trying to purify themselves, they were seeking God and the generation of matter. They were among the first men in our Western world, after a long dark age, to strive to understand and participate in the workings of the world, and that deserves to be remembered. After all, it may be that we are living in another age of fools and all we can do is hope somebody remembers how earnestly we tried as well as how spectacularly we failed.”

“I didn’t really think of you as someone who would be interested in… mysticism, god, whatever,” she said speculatively, as she absorbed that. She wondered if he’d meant his own actions as much as the wider world’s, if he felt himself to be another such striver, mired in a falsity and delusion and an arcane set of principles ruling his world, hoping to one day be remembered with some empathy by those who would know better.

“It’s not the mysticism, the belief, that fascinates me, but... the human frailty that surrounds it, I suppose. It’s so universal, we all come to a point in life when we must reach out in hope,” he said slowly, his voice ruminative, he looked at her steadily as though he had some message to convey if she could perceive it, “I may not reach out to some cold, overseeing figure the way some do, but I do still find hope... in some things.”

The moment stretched between them, still and precarious with meaning until she nodded finally, carefully, deciding she could acknowledge to him that she’d understood. Or at least understood what, who, if not why, or for what reason.

**

The next few days were eaten up with the scramble to catch the Alchemist, Trettle, who turned out to be a sad, sick megalomaniac who cared nothing for human life and abused his wife and daughter, frightening them and treating them as possessions. They were slow to catch him, far too slow, and another woman and a young girl were murdered to stand in for his wife and child. 

She stood over their bloodied, distorted bodies in Isobel Trettle’s nice, clean, suburban home where she was trying to raise her daughter in peace and felt only sickness and horror, and could see how a person might be moved to take a monster apart limb by limb in retribution for his sick acts. Trettle had killed an unknown woman and an unknown girl whose parents must now grieve, just so he could try to steal his daughter away from the life she’d known like she was just a piece of baggage. She didn’t understand how anyone could do this to a child. She had long been acclimatized to the violence and pathological destruction that people could deal out to each other, but she couldn’t see how anyone, no matter how deeply disordered their mind could murder a child and mutilate her. Not for any reason. She knew Trettle didn’t really care about his former wife or his child, they were simply possessions to him, and he meant to drag them along as he went on the run with no regard paid to the harm he did them.

He hadn’t even paid enough attention to his daughter to realize that her poor, lost stand in should have been fitted with an insulin pump. It was that arrogance that gave him away, gave them means to track down Annie and her madman father and her frightened mother.

She strode in to the stand off with Trettle at the convenience store and was not at all afraid. She felt only contempt for this delusional man, and knew that she had him figured out, she had him cornered. If she’d been given the time, she was sure she would have been able to talk him down, get him to tell his story, but she’d forgotten to take Isobel’s desperation into account. She hadn’t thought how little patience the woman would have left for Eric Trettle. 

Annie was going to be fine, physically anyway, her injury was not so severe as it had seemed. No charges would be filed against Isobel in the accidental shooting of the woman Trettle had held hostage. And Trettle had left detailed records of all his “patients,” so confident was he that he’d never be caught, so the Bureau expected quite the profitable mop up. 

The case had taken up all of her attention for a while, pushing aside thoughts of Red, giving her ample excuse to avoid going home even though Tom had returned. For a few days she’d had a simple sense of purpose. But Trettle was dead and the reports turned in, and now she would have to go home with nothing really resolved and new visions in her head of what Tom had really been up to all this time.

**

Tom’s return had not been so hard as she’d feared. She’s hardly spent any time at home, in any case, and she’d already had months of practice edging in and out of bed without waking him as she came and went from work. She already had weeks of practice pretending that his amiable smile didn’t chill her through with dread. 

She had reason to be angry with him, in the hypothetical context of their marriage. He had told her he’d gone to interview for jobs in New York, and she’d been entirely clear that she couldn’t move. She had at least a few days excuse to be moody with him and duck his soothing hands as he reached out to comfort and placate, entice. 

He tried pouting at her the first morning he was back, to win her over, saying he didn’t think he’d gotten the job after all, so no harm had been done. She hadn’t expected the way his crinkled brow and beseeching eyes would provoke her to fury. For once she wasn’t nervous of him, but enraged by his clumsy, arrogant manipulation and her failure to see it for what it was so much earlier. She’d nearly attacked him there, on the spot and gotten it over with, but she remembered the long game at the very last moment. Instead she snapped at him to remember to walk the dog before he left for the day and went to work.

**

She’d hardly seen Red as the case barrelled along, just phone calls where neither one of them seemed to be paying very much attention and a visit to a strange warehouse filled with busy techs decoding shredded documents where he’d seemed preoccupied the whole time. She knew the documents had something to do with the mole, but she didn’t know what he planned to do about the leak. She didn’t know more than the cursory details about the report of Tom’s trip, that Tom had indeed met with someone and Red had his people ‘following up on it as we speak,’ which could mean progress or nothing at all.

But it was more than the lack of communication that nagged at her. There had been that one brief stretch of perfect rapport between them. She had been so perfectly comfortable, it seemed, she felt as she remembered it, she had been so very glad of his company. And now they were back to distance and cryptic conferences and uncertainty. She thought it might kill off whatever softening had started in her towards Red, like a late frost come on in spring, but it didn’t. It only made her more aware of every missed connection, of every stray second of irrational expectation. It was a feeling she thought she could manage, she was rational, she knew it had no place in her life, but it worried her. _It’s not like it’s anything too serious,_ she told herself in the few quiet moments she allowed herself to think, _It’s just that I sometimes, often, want to see his face. That’s not so awful is it?_

Her awareness of his presence, or absence, had been amplified to a terrible extent, like she was some helpless, sentimental girl in a twisted tale, where the fair heroine falls under the spell of her too-powerful, mysterious suitor. But she was no fairy tale maiden, nor yet some sheltered governess out of a Victorian Romance, she should have been far too wise to be so swayed, to be so lit up. And if not too wise, she should be too far in grief and fear, too consumed by her sturdy, working spirit and the plotting and conspiracy that made up her world now. There should be no room left in her for a feeling so large, so warm and blooming and reaching out. But it was there in spite of all that, and she would just have to ignore it ruthlessly and refuse to indulge it until it went away.

**

Red called her to meet in the synagogue again, the night the case wrapped. She took a moment to breath and steady herself before she strode in to find him, only to find she was the first one there. She settled into the corner of a deserted wooden bench and tried to keep herself from constantly twisting around to watch the entrance. It was a nice place to sit and wait, warm and serene and free of prying eyes. She worried that, if Red was very long, she might drift off sitting up. 

She watched him approach out of the corner of her eye, knew it was him from his familiar hat-and-overcoat silhouette, his familiar gait. She looked up only when he sat beside her, taking in the tension in his face, the rounded set of his shoulders. She could could smell outside-damp and cigarettes on him, and she wondered where he’d been and what was troubling him, and just how much deflection she would get if she tried to ask. They sat in silence for a while, she’d been glad of the chance to adjust to his presence at her side once again. 

 

“I’ve had people working on the money trail, the person Tom Keen went to meet,” he began, not looking at her but at the dais at the front of the temple, “I’ve found a name. Berlin.”

“I guess you don’t mean the city.”

“No.”

“So who or what is Berlin?” 

Red shook his head a little and settled back against the bench, “I don’t know. A man, an organization, well funded… Obviously he knows me, but… He’s an unknown entity to me.”

Liz had an awful sinking sensation at this, and shivered, feeling suddenly unprotected, “But what does that mean for me? What do I do about Tom?” 

“That’s up to you, Lizzy,” he said, half-turned to look at her now, “The longer we have to observe his usual patterns before tipping our hand, the better off we’ll be. But you now have the evidence now to turn him in to your… esteemed colleagues. Or we could deal with him in any manner of other ways, if you were so moved, but I would urge you not to… commit to something you would later repent. You should know that revenge sours very quickly on the tongue no matter how appealing it may seem in the moment.”

“I don’t know, I --” she shook her head, bewildered, “He wanted to make me dinner tonight, to apologize for going behind my back about those fictional job interviews, so obviously he thinks he’s still got me fooled. I told him i had reports to write. I just… It’s so far beside the point, I know, but sometimes I just want to hold him down and make him tell me if he ever cared for me at all, or if I was always just a job. I mean, we were together for _three years,_ and I never noticed anything was wrong, but he didn’t even care enough about me to remember the details of our life without that board of his. What does that say about me?” 

He reached over and slid his hand gently into hers, the way he had once before, and she gripped back hard, but resisted the urge to lean in, go limp against him seeking comfort. 

“It doesn’t say anything about you, Lizzy. Although it says a great deal about him.”

He lifted their hands just slightly, as though he were studying the ring she still wore, or as if he were observing how their fingers fitted together. She felt her heart speeding within.

“I’ve put this much effort in, it would be stupid to let it go to waste. I can keep up the act a few more days. I say we give it until the end of the week,” she said, “But I’m going to have to turn him in soon or the Bureau’s going to have a lot of questions.”

“The end of the week then,” he said with a decisive nod. He settled back again, his thumb rubbing gently at the back of her hand, apparently happy to sit with her for a time, “I wanted to… You asked me before what I meant to do, after all this is done. The answer is that I don’t know. I will guard you safely through this as well as I am able and after that, whether i stay or go… that will be up to you.”

What am I supposed to do with _that_ , she thought, feeling the pressure of that decision already. “That doesn’t work, Red,” she said, “You can’t put that kind of responsibility on me. You know I’m just going to keep asking until I get a better answer.”

He laughed softly, fondly, “Of course you will, I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

“Can I ask,” she began in a lighter tone, hoping to break the stifling mood, “Why did you pick this place for a meeting point, of all places?”

“It’s not so very significant. You don’t have to worry about nosy waitresses or fellow patrons listening in, and meeting at a particular park bench is such a cliche, not to mention inconveniently cold and damp this time of year. Besides, it’s lovely here, don’t you think?”

She hummed her agreement, realizing that in his core, Red was a practical man after all, not _everything_ he did had some deeper meaning. “I like it,” she said, meaning the Temple, how they sat together, the little break from it all, “It’s peaceful.”


	7. everybody knows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is something of a break from my usual style because this sequence of events was really pivotal and had to be followed more closely. I really hope it reads well to all of you, and I really truly hope you'll let me know what you think of it.
> 
> a thousand thanks for the moral support and beta assistance to solitaryguardian/elizabethkeen, irish-buzzsaw/lovelylittlefreckle and roominthecastle, all of you kept me sane and moving forward on this beast of a chapter, so this is for you! And as I usually forget to say, thank you kindly for all your reviews.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded  
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed  
Everybody knows that the war is over  
Everybody knows the good guys lost  
Everybody knows the fight was fixed

\-- Everybody Knows, Leonard Cohen  
**

That Thursday was another grim grey morning with an enveloping chill, like so many mornings in the dimmest, darkest part of the year, with a certain silvery quality, a misty diffusion like the world itself was half in rest and bleary. It was the sort of morning that had always seemed to her nearer to it’s fellow midwinters than the other days of the year, like she might be able to shut her eyes and turn around and and when she looked again the windows would be banked with that same winter glow, and her bones would ache with the same endless tiredness and anticipation, but she would find herself getting ready for school as a child instead, and looking forward to being handed out red and green glittering sugar cookies or making tiny lanterns by hammering holes in tin cans in the long, stuffy afternoon. It was an expectant feeling, born of a moment’s wandering remembrance as she stood in her kitchen making the coffee, knowing in only a day or two the routine of these last years would be shattered forever more, and she couldn’t even picture what her life would look after that. 

She couldn’t see what her future was. There was only blankness and a sense that if she tried to hard to picture it, she would jump towards it, having lost all patience with these creeping careful days. But as desperate as she was to be done, there was still the sense of something ending, as though these were the final days of her ordinary life -- the dying remnants of the life she had pictured as a girl, that she had thought would stick her to the world where her cousins lived, her friends. She knew she was about to turn away from that world, let go of her claims on it and pass through a gate, or climb inwards and enter into another place entirely. It wasn’t just the unmasking of her husband that made her feel so, it was these past few days of revelations. It was sitting with Red in that Temple, where they had been safe from prying eyes and the way he had spoken to her bluntly about how much they didn’t know and she had felt the weight of that looming over her but she had also felt how inescapably she’d begun to crave, to lean in, to find comfort. 

She had been sustained, buoyed up by the memory of their hands shifting together, his skin warm and callused against hers, and her shoulder coming to rest gently against his, for days this small nourishment of contact had distracted her and kept her afloat when she slid towards panic. It was the smallest communication, but those moments seemed to be the only unvarnished, effortless exchanges left in her life and she clung to them. 

**

Tom came down as she was almost ready to head out the door, scruffy and rumpled in his pajamas. Even looking as harmless as he did at that moment, it was hard not to picture that cheerless, weapon filled lair of his and not want to fly at him and make him explain. 

“It’s the kid’s holiday play for the parents today, after school,” he said after mumbling good morning and kissing the side of her head as she held very still. He was watching her carefully as he spoke, trying so hard to read her it made her want to withdraw and she worked to hold some kind of mild, pleasant look on her face. “I thought since you said you were finished with your case, maybe you could come watch it with me and then we could go out to dinner or something. Or we could finally get a tree to decorate? I feel like we’ve been drifting apart, Liz, and I think you feel it too and I just wanna do something to reconnect, so we can start moving through this rough patch.” 

He was standing over her, leaning down with his most earnest, beseeching look, but she still saw something sharp in his eyes, like he was tracking her every move, as though he was beginning to doubt.

She felt her face freeze, and her heart still in her chest like it was wrapped up in ice and then speed on again with a profound jolt. He knows, she thought, He isn’t certain but somehow he knows. 

“I… we’ve been having a difficult time,” she said, uncertain and awkward and trying to keep herself from glancing around for the nearest exit, “It’s alright. It’s not just you, I… Things have been difficult lately, especially since my dad. But work is really intense right now, our… project is back on track, so I don’t know…”

“C’mon, Liz, this is important. Can’t you at least make time to come home and have dinner with me? I’ll get the tree, okay, and we can decorate it tonight… It’s only a week ‘til Christmas and I know it won’t be the same this year but my winter break is starting tomorrow and I would hate it if we went on through the holidays with this tension.”

The words were all perfect. It was just what he should have said, and if it had been even a month before she would have accepted it without question -- and yet there was this edge to his voice, a hard undertone. She heard it clearly, this note of frustration in him, she knew he was testing her, feeling her out. She had no idea what had happened, what he’d picked up on, or perhaps what he’d been told, but she knew he’d begun to see her disbelief. 

She did her best to soften her posture, smile up at him, nodding slowly. “That would be nice, Tom. It is almost Christmas after all. Barring any new cases coming in, it’s a date. We’ll make an effort,” she said, and it was her best acting, but she couldn’t help the dull tone of her own voice, couldn’t help feeling her own frustration that she would have to pick her way through a night of trying to play house, convince him all was well. Or maybe this would be the night, maybe he planned to ambush her when she came home. Maybe she was just reaching a new, astonishing level of paranoia -- but she knew that she wasn’t. 

She told him that she had to go to work, and grabbed her coat and her bag and walked out the door, all at a carefully measured pace, but not too measured, trying not to give herself away. He called out a promise to see her later as it were a normal day in a normal marriage and nothing was amiss.

**

She called Red once she’d driven some distance away. He had claimed to despise cell phones, calling them a nuisance and inconvenience and a handy vehicle for people to try to lie to him, but all the same he’d started carrying a series of burner phones on his person so that she could reach him directly at any time, and that alone was a sign of how tenuous the situation had become. She realized he had been anticipating this very moment, the news she had to give.

“I think he’s on to me,” she said as soon as he picked up, skipping all preliminaries, “He didn’t do anything, but I could see it in his face. He was talking about reconnecting and trying to see if I would flinch.”

“You’re away from the house now?” He demanded, instantly on alert.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I just don’t know what the next move is. He wants to have dinner tonight and I don’t know if he’s trying to reassure me that everything’s normal, or if I’ll be walking into an ambush.”

“But you’re sure he’s knows you suspect him.”

It wasn’t a question, but she still felt the need to defend her instinct, and the beginning of a strain of worry at the grave, fierce tone Red’s voice was taking. She realized he might still take matters into his own hands, that she might be inciting terrible violence. It made her hesitate, not out of any lingering protectiveness over Tom, but she remembered the stiff, pained way Red had moved the night he had returned; the strange, bleak light in his eyes as though he had still been looking out into a dark and evil place like a man that had been in a warzone, and she wanted more than anything to stop him from going to that place again.

“I don’t know how I know, but I do. He’s suspicious. He’s going to make a move soon,” she said at last. “I said was going to turn him in, Red, and I meant it. I have to if I want to keep my job, there will be too many questions otherwise. So, I’m going to need those surveillance photos, some of them anyway, and the documentation of the bunker. I know Kaplan gave those to you to look into.”

He was quiet for a long time, and she could hear a faint sound over the line like he was somewhere with people talking or music playing or some kind of commotion. She wondered what kind of plans or calculations were running through his head. “Alright,” he said slowly, “Let me wrap up here and we’ll meet. In two hours, I think. I don’t have the materials with me, the usual place. Why don’t you go have breakfast or a coffee in the meantime, somewhere nice and public with plenty of holiday shoppers, and no lingering on any lonely sidewalks, do you understand?”

“You don’t really think they’d try something do you? Things only shifted today,” she said, incredulous, “And anyway, if they wanted to hurt me, Tom had plenty of opportunity this morning and he didn’t lift a finger.”

“Please, let an old man indulge his paranoia, if you will, my dear, it’s the only reason I’ve lived half this long. I’m afraid I’m in the middle of something just this moment, and meet with you as soon as I am able, but until then I would like to know that you’re safely out of harm’s way,” he said with a kind of strained levity that meant he was genuinely concerned but didn’t want whoever he was with where he was to catch on, and when she failed to agree after several long second he continued, “I know you’re perfectly able to take care of yourself, but considering the circumstances…”

“Yes, okay, Red. I get it, I do. So, I’ll see you in two hours then,” she said, and that was that, the decision had been made. They would be going public about Tom today and her life was about to get turned inside out. She wouldn’t mind a couple hours to herself indulging in a leisurely breakfast and the company of her own thoughts because it was likely to be the last opportunity she had for a long time. But unfortunately she had other plans.

**

It was like those dreams you have in times of stress, where you dream self knows with a leaden certainty that there is a fire burning or a flood come and that you must pick and choose among your dearest possessions to carry out, and only so many, only what you can hold, as you escape the wreck of your home. And though the fire never grows nearer and the great destruction never comes the anxiety of the choosing, the planning is what forces you to wakefulness and saves you from that doom, not any pardon being granted. She had some time to think, knowing this day was coming, and realized she would have to save some things before the agents descended on the house she had shared with Tom and a plan to put into action for Hudson’s safety and security. 

She drove around until she knew it was well past the time when Tom would have left for the day and then doubled back to the house. His car was gone and a quick text to the surveillance team confirmed that he had left several minutes ago. She parked out front and went in, running through the list again in her head, the things she meant to put in a bag and stow away before chaos descended. 

Putting together a couple bags took almost no time at all. She thinks its because she had so often had she rehearsed this moment in her mind. Some clothes to keep her going while she was away from her things, a few things from her box of files that would be better off in her hands alone, a couple artifacts from her life before. She made the bed carefully, not wanting the scene techs and investigating agents to see the churned shape of the sheets and quilt, or to capture the indentation of her head on the pillow in their cameras, she smoothed and fluffed as if it were a hotel room, and it was as if she’d never been there. She paused at the doorway and, propelled by an impulse of finality, she slid the rings from her fingers and walked over to set them on top of the dresser in plain view. Then she called to Hudson, who had come to watch her as she moved briskly about the room in her packing, and left her marriage bedroom forever more.

She was overheated from her bustling about and from the way her body was now full of nervous energy, so she shucked her coat and left it on the front seat, and ushered Hudson into the back seat where he had his big plush towel to sit on and put her bags in the trunk. She had gone back in to gather some of Hudson’s essentials, intending to only be another minute or two, when she heard the front door open and close. She froze, straightening instinctively and reaching to her hip to touch her holster. Her phone trilled cheerfully, most likely with an alert from the crew across the way that Tom was back. For her instinct was correct in the assumption it was Tom. She watched him stride into the kitchen with a lithe, sharp kind of posture and a blank, hard expression neither of which she’d seen on him before now. Even knowing what she’d known for weeks, it was still a shock to see the coldness of him, the predatory watchfulness, like he was come to tear her into pieces.

“Tom,” she said, her voice startled and unsteady, “What are you doing here? I thought you’d be at school…” But bluffing was no good, not when she couldn’t convince her fingers away from where they rested on the snap of her holster, baldly giving away her fear.

“I could ask you the same thing, Liz. Didn’t you have to hurry off to work? Or is this work now? You’ve finally decided it was time to investigate good ol’ Tom again, hmm?”

“What are you…”

“Don’t play dumb, Liz. Did you really think I wouldn’t notice somebody following me on and off this last week? Did you really think I wouldn’t be able to tell that somebody had been in my storehouse? I haven’t made it to where I am now if I were so bad at the game,” he accused, his voice hard, sneering, almost outraged, and then, strangely calm. “You know, at first I thought you were having an affair, you were pulling away, staying out at all hours, getting urgent phone calls and having to rush away.”

“You knew my job was demanding,” she said, not sure why she was defending herself like it was a real accusation, or a real marriage, or like he a real husband rather than what he was. Perhaps it was just reflex, and her voice was hard in any case, distant, as though this had nothing much to do with her.

“You were coming home smelling of another man’s cologne and you wouldn’t let me touch you, an affair seemed kind of obvious -- I mean that night, with that flashy red dress, you floated out of here on a cloud, blushing like a virgin bride, for ‘work,’ what was I supposed to think?”

She felt her cheeks heat at that, uncontrollably, a bolt of fizzing embarrassment at how it must have looked, at how in spite of the fact that on the surface there were innocent reasons for all of this, she knew those reasons weren’t so innocent at all. For a fraction of a second, less than that, she relived the excitement she’d felt as she’d dressed that night with new eyes, relived the heat of Red’s hand against hers, and knew it for what it was.

“And it’s completely fucking nuts, but I was hurt, you know? Here I was putting on all this effort be this perfect husband, and you were still going to play away… But whatever, what did it matter, I had you, I could keep tabs on you, you did what I said, and that was enough for requirements.” 

“Whose requirements, Tom?” She cut in, unwilling to let him just rant on and on, trying to get him to focus his attention on her in the present, hoping he might remember some the affection he’d pretended for her and hesitate. Because as he spoke he advanced, and she was now backed into the corner of the kitchen, another few inches and she would be against the counter. Still her hand hovered on her gun ready to draw, but she wasn’t willing to aim at him just yet, somehow, “What are we talking about here? Who sent you?”

“But I finally figured out it was Reddington you were always running off to meet,” he said, not even acknowledging that she’d spoken, looming over her. “Do you even know what he is? What sick, amoral things he does? Or does he have you just as wrapped around his finger as I once did?”

She’d had enough, something in her snapped and sparked and she felt herself sink within that fury that consumed her sometimes, as though she was untouchable and righteous, and looking down from a vantage of perfect clarity and everything around her limned with hard edged brilliance-- and she found she had her gun pointed at Tom’s chest without even telling her arms to rise.

“Who’s Berlin?” She demanded, snarling back with venom, “What’s your game here? Tell me right now or I swear to god, I’ll shoot you dead and get it over with.”

But she’d miscalculated, hesitated too long, and Tom put up his hands in a feint towards surrender but struck out instead, grabbing the wrist of her gun hand before she could pull away, twisting and slamming her hand back against the granite countertop so that her whole hand was an icy shock wave of pain and she lost her grip on the weapon. She struck at him, trying to knock the wind out of him long enough to retrieve the gun but it was a clumsy attempt, her hand still smarting, and all Tom had to do was keep a hard grip on her shoulders to keep her from getting near enough to do any damage. He slid the the gun away with a hard shove of his foot, sending it spinning, and it lodged under cabinet under the sink, well out of easy reach, and the struggle began in earnest.

She was trained in self defense, she was fit and not easily winded, but Tom was tall and he was fast and he was ruthless and she was soon trapped, facing away from him, her arms pinned behind her back, awkwardly bent against the countertop so that it dug into her diaphragm, she found herself gasping and struggling against Tom’s bruising grip and the feeling that she couldn’t catch her breath. She had to rein herself in from tumbling headlong into dead panic. 

She thought for a second and then let herself go entirely limp, forcing him have to shift his grip to keep her in place and it gave her the chance to shift back from the counter and shift upright enough to giver her leverage. She brought her heel down on his nearest foot as hard as she could, thankful for his habit of wearing ratty Converse like a teenager and not something sturdier and when he involuntarily shifted his weight, she pushed off as hard as she could and pitched them both over to the floor. She’d landed clear of his hands, he’d hit his head against the counter as he went down. She heard the solid thud of the connection of head meeting granite as she scrambled round to take up her gun, and he seemed slightly dazed. She quickly put some distance between them so he couldn’t take her down by the ankle and pointed her weapon down at him, taking off the safety. She was breathing heavily and every nerve felt alive, her hair was falling awkwardly against her cheek and it itched but she didn’t dare soften her stance to push it back.

She was alight with the chemical fire of adrenaline, every movement seemed to happen so slowly as though, these few minutes had stretched as though to span hours. She wondered if there was help coming from across the way. She heard Tom shift against the broken crockery on the floor and she wondered if she was going to shoot him right there, right then.

“Don’t move,” she ordered, close to shouting, her arms already tiring from their awkward posture, the gun heavy in her hands, “Don’t you dare move, you bastard.”

“I know you, Liz, you don’t have it in you,” he said, levering himself up from the floor to launch himself again, his hand slipping briefly on a piece of shattered dinner plate, slowing him down.

So she reacted, without deciding consciously and yet with absolute conviction, sure that she would certainly lose in another physical confrontation with him and she didn’t think she could trust him to be merciful with her once he had the upper hand again. Her whole frame was filled up with the vibration of impossible impulse calling her to finally act. She re-aimed and felt the kick of the gun in her hand and found that she had shot him in the leg.

He landed awkwardly on the floor with a grunt of pain, and he looked up at her for a half second, face slack with shock that she had, in fact, pulled the trigger . And in the scant seconds as he absorbed that hurt, she lunged forward and struck him over the head with the butt of the gun as hard as she could, because a shot in the leg slows you down but it’s not like in the movies where it would be incapacitating, and he slumped down. 

She held a hand in front of his face to check he was still breathing, which he was to her profound relief, for there would be no information wrung from a dead man. She set aside the gun and dug through the nearby drawer for the blue masking tape she’d once meant to use while repainting the dining room and used that to bind his wrists in case he woke. It’s was surreal handling her husband-turned-stranger as he lay unconscious. She found she was squeamish over touching his skin and she made a clumsy job of restraining him, but wrapped well because she knew the tape would tear easily.

Then she paced furiously up and down her dining room and made calls, to get the Post Office which was the most difficult as she had to explain a great many details very quickly, to dispatch for medics, to Kaplan and the team across the street, which turned out to be unnecessary because there were members of the team pounding on the front door and then picking the lock even as she told Kaplan what had happened, and that Cooper was sending people immediately so they had to decide whether or not to disappear before the cavalry arrived.

There was another call she didn’t make, should have made. He would be furious that she didn’t let him know personally, as soon as possible, but first she had to rush to meet the two from the surveillance team, reassuring them she was okay, Tom was subdued, it was alright they didn’t let her know in time that he was back.

“We heard the gunshot and came running,” said one, a tall, weathered looking man with a long blondish ponytail.

“It’s just as well you dealt with him, you know,” said the other, a slight, black man who looked like he was just a kid, with a wry smile in her direction, “We’re not exactly the muscle. If we’re doing our jobs right, we don’t actually meet anybody, if you see what I mean.”

“But we would have protected you, Ms. Keen,” put in the blond man, but she wasn’t paying attention because she heard muffled noises coming from the kitchen.

She put her hand to her holster and swore under her breath to realize she had left her weapon on the counter when she looked for the tape. She took off down the hall, the two men from Kaplan’s team on her heels. She saw that there were a lot of bloody smears on the floor and the cupboard where Tom had been slumped, and a wad of blue tape on the counter. The gun was gone. Tom was gone. The back door stood open.

He must have been feigning unconsciousness the whole time, the noise she’d heard must have been him staggering to his feet and bolting for the door.

She let out a wordless noise of pained frustration and took off out the door, calling back to the surveillance guys, “Go around front, see which way he went, he should have been slowed down at least.”

The side gate was open and there were some spots of blood in the narrow alleyway between the houses. She spared a thought to wonder what her neighbors must think about all the strange goings on these last weeks, and now a gunshot and soon even more strange goings on. She ran out to the side street and didn’t see anything, so she jogged a circuit around the block looking desperately for some sign of her quarry. There was no sign of his car, which probably meant he was no longer on foot.The cold damp stung against her face, but she was too overheated with panic and desperation to care that she didn’t have a coat, that a light mist was beginning to fall, sticking her bangs to her forehead and chilling her skin. 

She’d lost him. She’d given herself away and then she’d lost him. And now she would have to tell the medics, whose sirens she could hear approaching, and Cooper shortly afterwards. And then she would have to tell Red.

**

She couldn’t actually process the ensuing chaos of that afternoon. There were the medics to turn away, and Kaplan’s people had vanished by the time she got back inside, unnamed and unknown and that seemed likely for the best. Then the team descended, Cooper and Meera both made personal appearances and a whole slew of people in FBI windbreakers came to photograph the mess of her kitchen and then tear apart her house. 

She was allowed to retrieve her dog from her car at one point, and she discovered that her hand was so sore and achy she had a hard time gripping his leash as she lead him into the house. He was utterly bewildered by all the commotion and sat whining on her feet. She called Meera aside for a moment and begged her to take Hudson for a walk when she had the time, knowing she had a dog that was ostensibly her children’s, and would know how to mind him.

Cooper wanted the whole story, so she told him, although she couldn’t later remember what words she’d used or what parts she’d told. Her mouth felt cottony, and her brain felt sluggish, now everything seemed the reverse of before, everything around her moving in a quick and dizzying flurry of activity that made her feel faintly sick and she herself was winding down like a bit of clockwork with tired springs. He wrist ached and throbbed and she found herself focusing on how to cradle it against her shoulder so it didn’t hurt so rather than tracking what went on around her.

“I tried turning him in once and it didn’t work,” she insisted at one point, “And I didn’t have enough to go on to try again. I thought if I could just figure out what he was up to first, we’d have a better chance.”

Cooper took pity on her, probably noticing her distress, the way her mind was wandering, and wrapped up his interview. He told her that oversight would probably have questions in the coming weeks and that she was back on leave for the time being, but he assured her that he felt she’d done the best she could under the circumstances. And that if she kept her receipts the the Bureau would foot the bill for her hotel stay for the next few nights because her house was going to be a designated crime scene for at least that long. “Look at it this way,” he said, trying to joke and looking at her with the particular brand of avuncular concern that she always seemed to bring out in male authority figures eventually -- it was somewhere between vague disapproval and the kind of worried look that often went with trying to show her to a chair and offer her a drink, “At least you’re guaranteed some time off for Christmas.” 

But she just frowned stonily up at him and feeling unable to form a polite response. She wished there was somewhere to retreat to but her whole house was filled up with swarming techs with cameras and lights and evidence tags. It was funny, but it hadn’t really bothered her when Kaplan’s people came through and did their sweep, but this felt like an invasion, perhaps even an accusation. She wondered abstractedly if the team across the street hunkered down in place.

And then, creating his own chaos in the ranks in his wake, Red strode in through her front door, Dembe following right behind looking as imposing and downright menacing as she’d ever seen. Red headed straight for her, ignoring Cooper who stepped up to challenge his presence. She couldn’t read the look on his face at all, it’s not something she’s seen before, but his eyes were wild with a furious light and he looked flushed and his mouth hard, and had that imperious lift to his chin that she used to see as judgement. She withdrew a few steps under an instinct to find somewhere private where they might talk, but knew even as she did that such a thing was impossible. She felt the attention of everyone in the room snap towards her and Red. She wanted to put her hands out to him, to forestall him, and just maybe in her disordered and distraught state to invite comfort from him, but instead she crossed her arms tightly and set her jaw, all defiance.

“Lizzy,” he called, his smooth tone cutting across the sudden quiet, “Imagine my surprise when I found I’d been stood up, and my downright horror when I received a phone call from a certain person telling me about… all of this,” he gestured sharply with an agitated hand.

“He had another name for us, Sir,” she interjected towards Cooper, who looked surprised by the phrase “stood up” and got an annoyed look from Red for her trouble. If Tom hadn’t said the word ‘affair’ to her just hours earlier she wouldn’t have stumble over the subtext, but now she was rattled, seeing potential for innuendo everywhere. She took an unsteady breath and looked up at Red. He cut an impeccable figure as always, dark hat perfectly situated, the heavy gray cashmere overcoat again, and shadowed under the brim of his hat, his eyebrows drawn together in a pained frown. “I’m sorry,” she said, leaving aside all pretense to speak to him directly, hoping he would understand how deeply she was rocked by her failure here, “He’s gone.”

To her absolute shock, he reached out his hand as though unthinking, stopping just short of touching the small bruise on her temple where she’d fallen against handle of a drawer and she looked at him in alarm, glancing around the room again at all the people who were taking this in. For a second his face was completely open to her, she could read every ounce of worry and frustration in him now that he stood so near but she hoped against hope that those standing by couldn’t see it as well as she did. His hand dropped and he seemed to subside somehow, his face smoothing and his posture straightening as if he’d been shored up from within. He nodded, just a faint dip of his chin as if to say, _yes, I understand, not here,_ and _later we will talk._

“Are they through needlessly interrogating you yet?” He asked, his tone was a tired imitation of his usual jovial bluff, but it seemed to go over seamlessly and she was reassured by this one small note of normalcy, as though she had finally found her one steady point at which to look.

“For the time being, I think,” she answered.

“Then, if Harold is amenable, I think you’d better come with me and tell me all that has happened, and then I can give you those files we spoke about,” he said, already taking her arm to tow her away.

“You don’t need to be here for this part, Keen. So, if you feel up to it, with Reddington might be the safest place for your right now,” said Cooper, moving aside to let them pass. If it weren’t so convenient, such a perfect excuse to finally escape the peering and prodding, she would have been more than a little outraged at how easy it was for Cooper to throw her over to Reddington at the slightest hint of useful intel and yet look askance at her for how closely she’d formed ties with the man.

She leaned very slightly into Red’s grip on her arm as they left her house, and tried to look like she wasn’t. She kept her eyes down and didn’t look around, even knowing it would likely be a long time before she was back. They paused before her front door, Red indicating to Dembe that he should go on ahead and wait by the car, and then asked her quietly, gently if there was anything they should take, where her coat was since it getting colder and colder out. 

“I left it in my car,” she said, “I thought I’d be right back out. I didn’t even lock it.”

His expression tightened at that but he didn’t comment, just ushered her out ahead of him of him and shut the door behind them with a final sort of snap.

The sky was still light outside as they walked down the front steps, just beginning to dim towards pale, pearly winter twilight. This shocked her somehow, as though she had expected the world to have come over in an apocalyptic dark, or that hours and hours had passed in this endless day and it should now be the middle of the longest night. She spared a thought to realize that right about now, the 4th grade students in Tom’s class would be putting on their holiday play for their parents and wondering what had become of their teacher.

She stopped short on the sidewalk, causing Red to turn to look at her in surprise. “We’ll have to take my car,” she said, “I packed a few… I have a couple bags in the trunk and I don’t want them seeing me move them.”

“Alright,” he said slowly.

“And we can’t forget about Hudson, he’s got to come with us,” she continued, standing stalk still.

“Of course, Lizzy, I’m not heartless. I love dogs, you know, but the life I lead isn’t exactly…” he trailed off, coming around to face her, and whatever he saw in her face seemed to make him terribly unhappy. He brought a hand up to rest ever so gently against her waist inside her unbuttoned blazer where no one inside the house could see. She jumped at the contact, but it grounded her, prompting her to refocus on his face, his dear, lovely face and the way the diffuse silvery light caught up in his lashes, and the way the line of his jaw worked as he tried to find words. She wished he wouldn’t frown so, it made her eyes mist up and her breathing shudder and she was determined there would be no tears with her coworkers looking on.

“I’m fine,” she said hoarsely, “Really. Nothing happened, he didn’t really hurt me. I should have just listened to you, huh?” She tried a smile, feeling bitingly, radiantly tender towards Red at the moment, seeing that he needed reassurance, and that they would need to have the rest of the conversation somewhere off the street. She reached into her pocket and dangled her keys at him.

“What’s this?”

“You’ll have to drive, I think I’ve sprained my wrist,” she said, and he withdrew to a decorous distance once again and took the keys lightly with the finest brush of his fingers against hers. He watched her closely with a speculative look for a long, dragging piece of time, as though coming to a decision and she let herself relax, knowing the ordeal of this afternoon was almost over, knowing she was safe letting Red take charge, for the next few hours anyway. She smiled up at him in weary relief.

“You two wait here for a moment,” he said to her and Dembe, “While I go and collect the dog.”


	8. 'til the tide rose too far

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in the direct aftermath, and Liz remembers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for the long delay between updates, my work life has been hellish (and that is no exaggeration). The chapter I wrote got away from me a little, so i'm posting it in parts. Expect another update at the end of the week, and I hope you are all grateful I didn't make you read more than 10,000 words at once ;). Hopefully after that I will be back on track for posting. I'm guessing this story will round out to be 13-14 chapters in totality and it is my earnest hope to have this done before the season premier, but I don't know if that's really reasonable, but I'm going to try my hardest to make it happen. As always, your interest and reviews help keep me motivated, though! Hopefully it hasn't been too too long and some of you are still interested in this...
> 
> Much thanks to my wonderful beta team, LovelyLittleFreckle and HarrietSpecter you are the best!

_Though we felt the spray of the waves,_  
 _we decided to stay, 'til the tide rose too far._  
 _We weren’t afraid, ‘cause we know what you are;_  
 _and you know that we know what you are._

_...The cities we passed were a flickering wasteland,_  
 _but his hand, in my hand, made them hale and harmless._  
 _While down in the lowlands, the crops are all coming;_  
 _we have everything._  
 _Life is thundering blissful towards death_  
 _in a stampede_  
 _of his fumbling green gentleness._

_\-- Only Skin, Joanna Newsom_

 

**

Liz wondered what Meera and the other agents on scene made of Red dutifully going to retrieve Hudson. If she had been thinking, she would have protested at how such a thing would look; although it was clear he had wanted her to stay put and be guarded over by Dembe. Maybe he thought that if he were careful enough, vigilant enough with her it would undo the damage wrought by her earlier carelessness. She was fairly certain they were still going to have words over this, her rash decisions today, but likely not until he was well and truly satisfied that they were secure. 

She got her coat from the front seat and pulled it on, buttoning up the blue wool against the encroaching chill. Her breath misted in the air and the damp afternoon was fading away to a frigid evening and she knew the cold that settled against her skin came from inside as much as out. She had at long last reached the absolute precipice she had been approaching for weeks now, months, ever since she found the mysterious box underneath the floorboards of her house. She had reached it and gone over it and everything that had once made up her life was now shattered and dissolved, was vanished out from under her or being examined by scene techs with impersonal care. She found herself now, finally, having to face the great blank vista that lay ahead of her; her future a place with no clear path, muffled up with fog and uncertainty and a great many fearful sinking places where she could easy be mired and entombed if she made any wrong move. And yet, if she looked past the jockeying clamour of things that must happen now, things that must be dealt with and borne until they were through, she felt as though a crushing burden had lifted from her back, and even as she staggered under the sudden buoyancy she found that it was at least easier to breathe.

**

After Red was back with Hudson, he asked Dembe to take their car and meet him at the safehouse. This left her alone with Red and she wondered if he would use this time to bring up how she had gone against his advice, and all senses, and walked straight into a confrontation with the enemy. But he didn’t. He sat for a minute or two familiarizing himself with the console controls of her car in silence and then glanced over as though checking she was present and settled and then, seemingly satisfied with what he saw in her face, got them under way.

She sat with her wrist cradled carefully in her lap, her fingers limp and curled as though she were trying to distance herself from not just the dull ache of it, but also her ownership of the limb. The momentous, irrevocable quality of what had happened that day, of what she had done that day was beginning to take root in her, furling out, becoming not just a crisis to fight through but a reality. Each action had led to the next and the next as though she’d been strung along on a wire and she’d had no choice but to act on each impulse as it occurred to her, but now that she sat still and quiet, had time to think, she could see how she how she might have and should have reacted differently in a hundred ways. She was even more chilled than she’d been earlier, despite the protection of the car and her coat, she was beginning to shiver and hunched up in her seat, trying to get warm.

“Are you alright, Lizzy?” Red asked, startling her. 

She had hardly forgotten he was there, driving her car to wherever it was he was taking her, but she hadn’t realized he was paying attention to her. She was distracted from her surroundings, lost in the jittery, disoriented feeling that always followed disaster, the cognitive dissonance of realizing that none of it had been nearly so bad as feared, and yet had also been a thousand times worse than could possibly been imagined.

“I feel really strange,” she admitted faintly. “Adrenaline let down, I think.”

They were stopped at a light and she felt his gaze on her but she didn’t look up from staring down at her own hands. The light changed and they drove on. She recognized the feeling of it and knew it for what it was but that didn’t make her more comfortable. She could get through almost any danger without feeling her hands shake or panic take her, but later, when she knew she was well and truly safe, the letdown was often more physically arduous than the long-passed crisis had felt at the time.

“How hard did you hit your head when you got that bruise?” Red asked, sounding on edge.

“Not hard at all. Really. I’m okay, just chilled. It’s all sinking in I guess.” She leaned back against the headrest and watched the city passing out her window, trying to guess where they were going.

“Mild shock, probably,” he said gently, reaching over to turn up the heater. “Why don’t you rest your eyes for a bit, hmm? I’m taking us to my current… accommodations, and it’s a long drive, I’m afraid.”

She followed his advice for once. Leaning back against the headrest and the doorframe, she thought she was more ready than she would like to admit to find a few minutes escape from reality, slipping easily into the chilled drowsiness that dragged at her like an oncoming tide. She didn’t sleep but sat with her eyes closed in a distant haze, listening to the wiper blades swiping the windshield and the dog snuffling quietly in the back seat and the faint rustling of Red’s coat as he navigated traffic. At one point he reached over and rested a hand -- very lightly as though he hardly dared disturb her -- on her knee and before she could decide whether she should respond or let him go on thinking she was safely sleeping and unaware of such a tender gesture, he had taken it back again. Her chills, at last, had begun to ease. 

**

His accommodations of the moment were not what she’d pictured. He had parked on the street in the outskirts of town and led her around the corner to a non-descript door in an alleyway that let them into a large, cluttered old space that was set up as a workshop. It was dim and smelled of dust and perhaps some kind of stain or oil, something both warm and astringent, chemical and earthy. There was some project with gears and workings spread out on a large, sturdy work table, with a magnifying lamp crooked over it as though watching from on high. There were a number of large and venerable metal tool chests, mostly covered in dust as though they’d seen little use for some time, and in one corner by the one large, frosted-paned window, there was a drafting table with an old anglepoise lamp and a tall, battered looking map chest beside it.

Red had left her in the middle of the room, with Hudson on his leash, to look about as he went over to the corner to reset the alarm after them, apparently feeling there was ample reason to be paranoid today. Then he came back and led her out a door in the back of the workshop and up a brightly light, modern, curving staircase that led a long way up. The staircase debouched on a broad, balconied landing that looked over the staircase and was in turn looked down on by a large, angled skylight high above them. There was a narrow window set into one wall the the landing that looked out over the street, and she looked out of this at the gloomy evening as Red typed in a number in the keypad by the door to let them into the apartment propper. The glass was splattered with little, chasing raindrops, distorting the view so that she could barely see the muted sidewalk below.

“Lizzy?” called Red from the open door, “Are you coming?”

The apartment itself seemed as though it was just freshly finished. All the walls were smoothly white and the floors were blond, polished wood. It was sparsely furnished, and the smell of new paint and cut wood and clean, dry newness still lingered faintly in the air. The entry hall wound past a long, tidy galley kitchen and a little dining space off the other side, and around a corner to a wide sitting room. Red closed all the curtains on the high picture windows by the low, warm light of the hall before he turned on the carefully placed track lights that spangled the room in light and shadow, most likely meant to highlight art that wasn’t yet hung on the walls. Then he came back and took Hudson’s leash from her and unhooked it from his collar to let him wander and investigate, apparently trusting the mellow dog not to cause disaster in this pristine, borrowed apartment. There wasn’t much to the room thought it was a large space, a low couch, a sling chair and ottoman that looked impossible to get in and out of, a large battered trunk in place of a coffee table and a lot of still-packed, much abused cardboard boxes stacked up against one wall. 

“You’re welcome to look in them, if you like,” Red said, noticing where her attention lay, “But they’re not mine so I can’t vouch for their contents.”

“Then why did you just invite me to look through them?”

“You know me, I’m never above snooping through somebody else’s things if they’re careless enough to leave them lying around,” he answered glibly with a wicked little smirk, and then motioned, inviting her to take a seat.

All at once the world seemed to snap into focus once more and she rose out of the muffling dissociation, the thin film of distorted remove she’d felt herself shrouded in all afternoon. She found herself smiling at Red, at how shameless he was; at how utterly ludicrous beyond all reckoning her life had become; at how she was finally, finally free of her demon husband and his false skin. He might be out there still and they would still have to deal with him but she was no longer yoked to him by the manifold deceptions they’d spun, he and she, testing and tormenting each other ‘till she was at the brink of despair. 

She would never again have to lie still and silent and horror-bound awake in bed beside Tom, or let him loom over her with threat disguised as cloying affection. She was ensconced in Red’s safe, strange apartment with Red and Dembe to watch over her, and she was finally _free._

“You’re terrible,” she told him lightly, and laughed a little because he was, but at the moment it didn’t bother her at all. In fact, just at the moment, his terribleness was most awfully endearing. He was terribly crooked, she would never forget that--could never--but with her he had never pretended to be otherwise. He had presented himself to her -- and she had begun to accept that, it had been to her, the Bureau was almost incidental -- unvarnished and despicable, and persistent, at times annoyed and frustrated with her and at times almost plaintive but above all unflinching, for her approval or rejection. 

Red returned her smile but looked confused by her giddiness, perhaps even concerned. “I don’t believe I’ve ever claimed to be otherwise,” he said slowly, walking towards her to take her elbow lightly. “Are you sure you’re quite alright, Lizzy? You really didn’t hit your head that hard?”

She shook her head, still smiling, warmed by his concern and wanting him to understand. She reached up and straightened his coat collar with her good hand and then kept ahold of it when she could think of no real persuasive reason to let go. “I’m really fine, Red,” she told him kindly, “I should probably be a nervous wreck wondering what he’s getting up to now that I let him get away. And I’m sure in a few hours I will be wishing for a whole lot of Advil -- And there’ll be another inquest to get through soon, but it’s just occured to me... I’m out, Red, I don’t have to go back to that house and pretend to be that man’s wife ever again. I don’t have to do that anymore.”

She watched his face resolve into understanding, his expression soft and a little bit sad. She found she wanted to smooth away the little frown between his brows but that would be too much, too far.

In spite of the gravity of the situation she couldn’t help basking in his concern. Now that she understood that he meant it in earnest, now that she knew so well the difference, having someone worry over her felt like such a luxury, something she didn’t quite need, maybe hadn’t earned, but she enjoyed it just the same. He reached up, as he had back at the house, towards her temple, and this time his fingers brushed her skin, warm and callused as they trailed across her forehead as though he could wipe away the little bruise, the corners of his mouth tipped down in a little moue of utter concentration as he smoothed her bangs back out of her face.

“You’ve borne all this very well, and it’s been so much more than anyone should be made to bare… I’m proud of you, Lizzy. I know you were upset about letting Tom get away, but in all honesty, it was the best way the encounter could have ended -- there was no guarantee he had orders to keep you alive and,” he stopped himself, his face going utterly still as though a shutter had been closed between them and he stilled for a second before he shook his head. He cupped her shoulders lightly and let go, took a half step back to a more respectable distance. She had to let his collar slip out of her grasp so as not to give the impression of clinging. “Enough of that. Coat off please, Lizzy, I want to look at that wrist.”

She obliged him and sat on the soft leather couch and allowed him to prod and examine her sore wrist and her bruised knuckles, satisfying himself that it was nothing more than she had said, a slight sprain and a little swelling. She pretended not to notice the way he cradled her wrist for a while after his proper examination was done. His grip lax, almost reverent, and his fingers pressed against the fine, tender skin of her inner forearm, staring down at her pale arm and the pink curl of her scar on the heel of her hand. 

He released her and stood and she almost didn’t know what to do with her hand now that it was back under her charge. It hovered in the air a moment as though reaching out to where he had sat. She found herself unconsciously mimicking his earlier gesture of brushing her hair out her face, and, startled, let her arm fall to her side.

Red brought her anti-inflammatories and a glass of water and stood nearby, looking out the window rather than joining her on the couch again. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself; and he too seemed a little awkward, stiff and a little fidgety as he looked through the gap in the curtains, the gauzy folds of which seemed to twitch and jump in his grasp. He had shed his coat and hat, but made no further move towards settling in, almost as if he expected more activity tonight.

“Where’s Dembe?” She asked at length. “I thought he was meeting us here?”

“He’s here, he’s just downstairs. There’s another apartment under this one that he uses when we stay here. He thought you might like some of privacy, considering what kind of day it’s been.” He turned back to her, letting the curtain fall closed. “What on earth were you thinking, going back there? After you were so sure he knew you were onto him?”

And there it was. They were buried as deep as they might ever be, with every shut door they could manage between them and the outer world and its marauding dangers, and more than likely his faithful right hand man standing by to guard the gate, he might at last get down to the confrontation hanging over them. She sighed and folded her hands neatly in her lap, tired beyond any angry defensiveness. 

“You know what I was thinking. I wanted my things. I wanted my dog. I wanted to pack a goddamn bag without my boss standing over my shoulder watching me do it, like _I was the one_ who’d committed a crime,” she stared him down, unwilling to apologize. “And I know _now_ it sounds really stupid but… I really did think Tom would be out. The surveillance team confirmed he’d left and he’s _always_ out at that time of day.”

“He’s always out?” He repeated back, his voice rising in disbelief. “The sheer inscrutability and unpredictability of this man has been a thorn on our side for how many weeks now and you were counting on ‘he’s always out at that time of day?’”

“I do know how it sounds, and I see, now, how that was…” she stalled there and shrugged, not willing to tear herself down further in his eyes when she had already acknowledged that it was a mistake. “I certainly wouldn’t do it again, without back up or… telling you before I went in but. I can’t say I’m not relieve that it’s just finally done. I don’t know what else to say.”

“You never had any intention of doing what I asked, did you?” He asked, and maybe it was a trick of the light but she thought he looked grudgingly amused, “Well, I’ll give you that much, Lizzy, your ability to bluff has improved a great deal since we began working together. I wonder if I ought to be pleased or alarmed.”

“Don’t think I learned it from you,” she told him sharply, thinking _and I wouldn’t have survived these last months if I hadn’t remembered how,_ and _you can’t be disappointed in me when I only agreed to lie because of you._ “I just didn’t think I would need those skills anymore. They were rusty when I met you.”

“I see,” he said carefully, but for once she had the strange sense that he did not.

“Where were you when I called?” She asked to keep him from inquiring further. “I noticed you were really careful not to say my name and I thought I heard music or something in the background.”

“I was in a meeting. Not an altogether successful one, I must admit, but I got my point across,” he shook his head, seeming to dismiss the unsatisfactory encounter from his mind and strode away from the window at last. Seeing her expression shift in dismay at what ‘got my point across’ could mean, he hastened to reassure her. “You’re always so willing to jump to the worst possible conclusions about me, Lizzy -- it was a purely rhetorical point I made, and I did manage to make it without resorting to baser means. The interested party now believes I’m satisfied that the leak is eradicated.”

“Is it?”

“I believe the saying goes ‘better the devil you know,’” he said. “I’m embracing that principle for the time being. Can I offer you a drink? If there were ever a day to require one, I believe this qualifies.”

He was walking towards the kitchen as he spoke, seemingly all at ease and nonchalant, in his usual unflappable manner of laughing into the dark, but suddenly he stilled, stopped in the doorway and looked back at her. A change had come over him, he was utterly grave, his eyes searching, almost as though he was checking she was still there.

“When I got that phone call today, about what had happened,” he said, his voice sounded tight, raw. “For a second, I thought…”

Her breath caught, a funny little jerk of her lungs, out of nowhere she was near to tears, not out of sorrow or remembered fear, but out of a strange, warm, caving-in feeling as she watched the echo of that moment of horror play out across his face, the visceral honesty of his expression. She stood, feeling caught in Red’s gravitational pull once more. “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” she said, equally hoarse, “I didn’t mean to frighten me either, you know.”

He cleared his throat, shifting a little uncomfortably, visibly trying to shake off the mood. She heard the scratching of Hudson’s claws on the polished floor as he wandered back in to join them, pausing to reach up and sniff Red’s hand as he passed. 

“I know you didn’t, Lizzy,” he said softly. “I’m just… glad to see you here, safe and well.”

**

She settled in. There was no pretence made towards her finding a hotel for the night, Red wanted her to stay and she wanted to stay and both of them knew it. If he offered she would have felt obligated to turn him down and that was the last thing she really wanted, and he understood that just as clearly and kindly let their arrangement go unvoiced and took her agreement to stay as read.

**

They didn’t have that drink he offered because around that time Dembe brought her bags up from the car, he and Red stepped into the hall for a time to talk together about something. She didn’t know what, but it seemed rather urgent and the thought of dealing with more urgent that night made her bones ache like she was a hundred years old and hadn’t slept for almost that long so she didn’t force her way into the discussion. Instead, she found the ziplock bag of Hudson’s food in her things and poked around the gleaming white-and-pale-wood kitchen for a couple of bowls for her dog’s food and water. The beast himself, realizing that he would finally be fed, was under foot every step of the way. 

She heard the front door open and close again and Red came back in alone, and his posture as he stood in the kitchen doorway was different, looser at last, no longer a man expecting the call that would send him back out into the trenches and the wild dark but a man who means to stay a while in the safe cloister, out of reach of any storm that might rage outside.

While Hudson was eating Red took her bags and showed her the room she would be staying in and the bath across the hall. It was down a hallway that led off from the living room opposite the kitchen and turned one corner and another and continued on past the door of the room that would be hers, giving the feeling that the apartment wound inward and inward with it’s lovely white walls and golden wood floors spiralling on, like some modern nautilus. 

She noticed he didn’t linger in her space, loaned though it was, he set the bags down on the foot of the bed and retreated back to the neutral ground of the hallway. Without thinking she announced that she intended to relax and have the hottest, longest bath possible, and realized that was a more-intimate detail than she was used to sharing with him, and watched in awkward amusement as he averted his eyes from her as though she meant to start disrobing that instant and then glanced up at her under his lashes and told her vaguely that there would be food later, he would let her know when.

“Alright,” she said. “Don’t let Hudson get into anything he shouldn’t.”

He nodded solemnly and retreated back towards the front of the apartment.

Her room for the duration, whatever that might be, was neat and tidy and fully furnished, with no cardboard boxes in sight. It wasn’t a large room by any means. It was furnished with simple, beautiful pieces. On one wall there was tall window, hung more of the crisp white linen curtains, and on another wall was the bed with a high wooden headboard and a thick duvet, and a dark grey plaid blanket folded at the foot, looking all too inviting. It wasn’t an intimidating room. She wasn’t sure why but she had always pictured Red as perpetually surrounded by opulence and grandeur to the point of oppressiveness, but this place wasn’t like that at all. It was fine but cozy, she didn’t feel like an intruder here, in fact she felt more comfortable here in this little guest room then she had for months in her own home. She felt solid here, like a human woman, not, as she’d felt for so long now, brittle and foreign, as if she and everything around her would break open if she made one wrong move. Now she could breathe. Now she could stop mincing with such terrific care.

She picked out a comfortable change of clothes and set her bags aside, not sure if she should move into the tall dresser or not -- she wanted to. She wanted to set all her things out with care and say _I am here, these are my new surroundings, I and all my trappings have survived,_ but she knew this was just a way station before flying forward into the coming weeks, and she shouldn’t hope to feel settled any time soon. Instead, she headed across the hall to wash away the hurts of the day, the last touches of her false husband from her skin.

**

Liz spent a long time in the deep, footed tub that dominated the bathroom, in water hot enough to hurt, with steam condensing on the round mirror and the glass counter and shelves, her heart pounding in the nearly claustrophobic heat. She tried out the unfamiliar bar of handmade soap that looked unused, making the whole room smell of sandalwood and roses. She catalogued the places on her body where bruises were coming out.

After she’d worn herself out with extensive bathing in a sauna of steam, her muscles finally lax, and her mind too stupefied to whirl and ratchet her back up into panic, she washed her hair and fumbled her way through drying and dressing. She ambled across the hall to her guest room, intent on finding a sweater before rejoining Red -- he said there would be food and she supposed she ought to be hungry, having torn her life apart instead of having breakfast, but she was too weary to notice. She found herself laying down on the thick comforter, as though from a distance as some other person controlled her limbs, tugging at the soft pillow under her cheek and reaching for the smooth wool blanket that should be right by her feet. She slept.

**

She dreamt but she did not dream. She walked abroad in the borderland between dream and memory, transported by the stresses of the day, the strangeness of it, the way she’d felt herself stretched thinner and thinner, made ever more insubstantial by the trial of the last months until she was nothing more than a taut nerve and a watchful vigilance.

**

A girl lay in her bed and it was dark but the man-in-the-crescent-moon lamp on her dresser burned dim and yellow as a candle. The curtains were open so she could watch the snow fall in the glow from the Christmas lights strung under the eaves as she went to sleep.

It wasn’t the night before Christmas, it was still five whole days before that, but the little girl couldn’t sleep because there was the same kind of expectant feeling in the air. Maybe it was just the snow. She plucked at the fuzzy, nubby ear of her teddy bear and watched the dark night rather than trying to fall asleep. 

The house was all quiet, it was the middle of the night and everyone was gone to bed and the girl had awoken. She wanted her mother come back and re-fluff her pillows, which had gone bunchy, and tuck her in again and kiss her goodnight again and then maybe that would be the magic thing to make her feel settled. But she was big now and didn’t call out for her mother at night anymore. Especially when Father was home, because he didn’t like being woken up. 

Her mother wasn’t even there that night, she remembered--her mother had gone on a trip. Her father had hugged her goodnight and she’d had to put her own self to bed. No one had tucked her in because she hadn’t been brave enough to ask him to do it. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t stayed asleep like normal, had instead woken in the quiet and the dark.

Then the house was not all quiet. She heard a noise and the door opened. There was a man, he stepped into the room soundlessly, looking shadowy and alarming. 

But her mother had told her there would be a man, that he would be coming to pluck her up in the night, some night soon. She made the girl recite what she was to ask the man and what he should answer--it was their own little code between mother and daughter that meant ‘all clear, we can relax now.’ She learned what she was to do when the man showed up, to remember to keep her warm coat and shoes in her closet and not the one downstairs by the door. 

The girl sat up and asked her question, as quietly as she could and the man whispered the right answer so she got up and tip-toed over to her closet and got her coat and boots and the man helped her into them and plucked a hat from the high shelf and told her to put that on, too. 

Now that it was actually happening she was so nervous and uncertain that she was clumsy, she was shaking and cold all the way through. What if she was making a mistake and this wasn’t the right man after all? What if her mother wasn’t really waiting for her? What if it was all a dream?

**

The girl came home from school one afternoon, late in autumn, her backpack bouncing on her back as she ran home from the bus stop. It was raining and she didn’t want the drawing she had done in class to get wet before she showed her dad. As soon as she got to her driveway she saw there was someone strange sitting on their porch steps. A woman in a ratty looking blue duffle coat and a messy dark ponytail. The woman stood up when she saw the girl approaching, she reached out a hand.

The girl drew to a halt, skipping a bit to halt her momentum. Her heart was pounding. There was something about the woman, the girl couldn’t see her face very well because the porch light was behind her, but the girl felt sure without knowing why that the woman was crying. 

The girl wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, and she was never ever to let anybody into the house that they didn’t expect, even if she knew them. She stood stock-still, not sure what to do. The woman didn’t seem dangerous but Daddy would be so disappointed in her if she didn’t follow the rules and she’d have to go back to getting picked up by Aunt Judy and having to play with Nick and Amy after school every day, which was an unbearable prospect. 

She turned around and raced back up the driveway, up to the neighbor's house at the end of the street, just like she was supposed to, where the nice old woman who lived there was always home in the afternoons and would let her call her dad at work and let him know.

She dropped the drawing as she turned and didn’t even notice. Later, after she’s raced off, the woman walked slowly up the drive and picked up the drawing and wiped her eyes, folded it carefully and slipped it into her coat.

**

Liz had another dream. A different dream that did not whisper to her of past places but of longings she kept under lock and key and didn’t dare acknowledge for the sake of the damage that she might do. Impulses born of the place in her that didn’t know right and wrong but moved like elemental forces. For she’d come to see that every time she reached for what she desired she caused disaster, like she was a one woman wrecking crew.

Her dream self was submerged in the ringing that now lived in her bones, that awareness, that wanting. She dreamt of being found again as grown woman, lifted up from danger. He was there, dark and looming and he kept hurrying them on, there was some terrible, dark, fatal menace that was pursuing them, stalking them as though they were prey, but all she wanted was to pull him aside, if they could find somewhere warm and safe and small where she could cling to him, make him put his hands on her, make him prove what she was to him at last, at last. 

It was horrible and and it was wonderful and she woke herself with her own tortured confusion.

**

She woke in an unfamiliar room, it took her a moment to remember where she was and why, the fog of the dream was so strong, and her mind rebelled against the reality of the things that had happened to bring her here, and the reality of the things that had awoken and reconnected in her memory as she slept. But the fog retreated and the realities of these things held true, filling her with a strange energy. As she became aware, she felt present in her own body in a way she hadn’t in so very long as though she’d finally granted herself permission to live in her own skin again. 

The bed was soft, perhaps the nicest she’d ever felt, but she would not sleep more, not with the import of the things she had just come to realize filling her head. She rose, stepped over the sleeping dog, wandered out into the dark hall and followed it around until she stood in the doorway of the one lit room.

When Red looked up from his book, lounged against the arm of the couch, rumpled and without the usual armour of vest and jacket, his features set in gentle abstraction, and his eyes met hers as though he were asking a question, as though he were voicing a hope, all her insides swooped and resettled and she took an involuntary step forward. _Yes,_ she thought, _It is still true, now, awake. It will go on being true. I think it’s time to see what it’s made of, whether either of us can talk about it aloud._

She spoke.


	9. O are you the boy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is chapter 9 as promised... and I'm sorry about the ending. Not to worry, the next part is done, it just needs some polishing. The last part of this trio character-study & backstory revealing chapters will be posted in just a couple days, I swear! This chapter is nearly all Red, despite it being Liz's story, but then again Red is a big part of Liz's story so I suppose it makes sense. I really hope you enjoy this exploration of Red as much I did when I wrote it... and I really hope you will let me know what you think and what you think of my characterization, and all of that! and I really do swear, the ~big reveal~ is coming nigh on immediately, so please don't throw things ;)

_'O are you the boy_   
_Who would wait on the quay_   
_With the silver penny_   
_And the apricot tree?_   
_'I've a plum-coloured fez_   
_And a drum for thee_   
_And a sword and a parakeet_   
_From over the sea.'_   
_'O where is the sailor_   
_With bold red hair?_   
_And what is that volley_   
_On the bright air?_   
_'O where are the other_   
_Girls and boys?_   
_And why have you brought me_   
_Children's toys?'_

_\- Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience, Charles Causley_

 

**

Ray was an adventurous child. His grandparent’s home was an old farmstead and his long, hot summers there were a country idyll out of a storybook. 

He was unable to sleep late in the narrow brass bed under the patchwork quilt his grandmother’s grandmother had made out of hundreds of little squares of calico and worn out work shirts. He would lie still under the breeze from the fan he was allowed to keep on the dresser and his fingers would follow the seams between the little squares of cloth and pick at the colored floss ties that sprouted like shaggy stubble from the surface of the patchwork as the sun began to rise and light his attic room and stir the night dew to billow up as low, fine mist over the grassy fields and hills that surrounded the sturdy, white house. Then he would rise and dress. From his bedside table he took his book, his compass, and his folding pocket knife. From the kitchen, after he crept down the back stairs quietly so as not to wake Grandmother -- who slept so lightly it was as if she hardly slept at all -- he would take an apple, the stack of sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper his mother would make for him the night before knowing he would up and ready to roam the next day before anybody else, and these all would go in his little back pack that hung on a hook by the door. 

He would lace up his sneakers on the back porch while listening to the dawn chorus of birds and looking at the hot, hard lines of the light from the summer sunrise, golden and black, with the sky dark with blueness and the sun so squinting-bright, and the yellowing, waving grass seeming to spring to life in the glistening light, cut with hard dark shadows edging the bending leaves. The wood beyond what he called the Meadow looked cool and deepest green but also glossed with goldeness, beckoning him. He would set out then, slowly, savouring the early morning stillness, as though he were trying to sneak up on the day; as though he were trying to feel within himself the unthinking wildness of these small sweet country things; feel and encompass their moving and singing and being in their fleeting, vital, eternal way.

He did not know fear as a boy; he did not know that harm, real harm, that was anything more serious than being sent to bed without dinner with a stern scolding, could be done by him or to him. He was let to ramble all the morning, and sit on the banks of the little stream and watch the water-skaters and the ripples over the stones as he ate his sandwiches as a late breakfast and then maybe whittle a little branch with his pocket knife for a walking stick or maybe try to follow a deer’s tracks in the woods to try to see where it lived -- for he still somehow believed, though he knew better, that if deer had these close, worn paths all their own like cut trails then they must also live in close sheltered glades or dens or burrows the way boys lived in houses. 

Then he would go back to the farmhouse for lunch and, afterwards, help Grandfather with the chores until it was time for their big, early kitchen dinner, cooked by his mother and grandmother, on blue willow plates. He would sit in the wide, dim kitchen and still feel the hot sun on his skin and the fresh breeze on his face. And drowsy with the days activities he would go wash up for bed, up the big front stairs and then the little back ones to his attic bedroom that his mother had slept in when she was a girl. 

Now when they stayed at the farmhouse for the summer, she slept downstairs in the guest room, a whole floor between them. That had scared him at one time, to go to sleep so far from her that she wouldn’t hear if he got up or woke from a dream or needed a glass of water. And then, as he grew older, it made him feel independent and accomplished--he had a whole little dormered floor to himself, his own bathroom too, with a shallow tub tucked under the slant of the roof, a medicine cabinet with a little shelf in it if he ever needed to keep something there. He would switch on the fan, a concession made due to the heat of the attic, kept in by the hunched, angled shoulders of the roof like an overtired sunbather who had baked himself brown, and lie against the cool sheets and fall into the deep, uncomplicated sleep of a child who has been outdoors all day.

Ray wanted to be an explorer when he was little, like the Spaniards he read about, like Captain Cook, and Franklin with his Northwest Passage, finding whole new continents or islands, new people, strange desert places and pristine paradise. He didn’t want it for conquering though, or to mine and loot, he only wanted to see it -- to see unknown, undiscovered, unearthly places, and walk there and know it, and maybe never tell anyone at all because then it would be his, just his secret. When he was older though, he knew that the world, so he thought, had been all discovered and circled round and round and made into tourist destinations, no more explorers need apply. 

After that he never really doubted that he would go into the Navy like his father, though he did well in school, very well, he absorbed knowledge as though it seeped into his skin, for he hardly bothered to study. His father was gone with the Navy a lot, so often it was just him and his mom in the little house in the suburbs, and his father always said he was off seeing the world and keeping people safe. He knew it wasn’t just that, he saw about the war and the protests in the papers and on the TV, but that didn’t seem real to him, it seemed like something out of a book or a movie, not something that could hurt him, or hurt his dad. Ray was tired of being stuck at home with his schoolbooks and his chores, he wanted to see the world, too.

**

The man Raymond’s team answered to was a powerful man; terrifying when angry; whipping his men up into a lather; impressing on them the vital, tenuous nature of the work they were about to do before sending them out into the field. He was respected by everyone and seemed to have connections everywhere, but especially all over the nation’s capital and in the networks of informants they used. He was known as an honorable man, fiercely loyal to those who were loyal to him and to those who were not he was merciless.

He thought Raymond was something special. He’d begun to take him under his wing and let him in on some of the secrets of the trade. Sometimes when Raymond was home from an assignment they’d have a drink in his office, or even more rarely, Raymond and his wife would get an invitation to party for the inner circle and their wives.

There were rumours about this man’s family though. They said his wife was unstable, she was a depressive, sometimes she wasn’t really in touch with reality, she’d spent a little time in a private clinic, recovering. Raymond wasn’t sure he believed it, though he’d honestly never given it much thought. He’d met the wife at a couple of the parties. She was pale, but naturally pale not as though she were ill, and tall and slim, graceful, classically lovely but in spite of all that, the word that occurred to him to describe her was watchful, maybe even wary. 

There was also a daughter, a few years older than his own baby girl. His commander had congratulated him with genuine feeling when Raymond and his wife found out the sex of the baby.

“It’s the best thing in the world to be the father of a baby girl,” his commanding officer told him and clapped him on the shoulder.

But of course his career was taking off and every trip away he would come back and feel like his little Abby was growing up so fast and he was missing so much of it, like it was all just sliding through his fingers. Sarah didn’t like it either. She didn’t like him spending so much time away, leaving her alone with a little baby, she was in effect a single mother when he was away, save for the ring and her married name, and that was hard for them both. 

Still, his commander had hinted to him in confidence that Raymond was bound for great things, and advancement was coming soon, he just needed to be patient and then he wouldn’t spend quite so much time in dark, unpleasant corners of the world or deep undercover. He might not have more time but he would at least go home to his wife and daughter more nights than not, he just needed to learn how to move in the right circles.

It was just that the right circles had other plans, in the end.

**

Raymond hadn’t slept the night before the unplanned confrontation at the Keen house, not really. Hadn’t done more than lay in his wide, soft bed, flat on his back and shut his eyes to the smooth ceiling and turned his gaze inward to the interior landscape he kept; the vast labyrinth of his memory. 

From boyhood he had known that is memory worked extraordinarily well, far better and more exactly than the other boys’. But it wasn’t until much later, after his first life had been built and torn apart, that he began to keep it in any intentional way. He had begun by trying to find and relive every memory of his lost things. He kept trying to find that unconscious but intentional threshold of sleep where he knew at times he could enter into a memory so that it was almost a dream, almost a place he walked through with his body, seeing it’s walls, its slants of light, smelling its smells but not, almost never, hearing its sounds. Gradually his practice grew, as he read about the art -- and his new life came to depend on keeping an infinite store of knowledge. He had come to know how to fix locations in his memory like signposts and, under each appropriate sigil, cache the information he needed to keep his life and livelihood. 

But on these long nights -- these longest nights in the cold winter with snow threatening and Christmas carols and Christmas decorations seemingly everywhere he turned -- it was the tenderest, haziest memories from Before that he sought to bring out and unfurl. He never knew if they did him more good or harm.

**

In the morning, when the time came for Raymond met with Fitch in the reading room of his club he was as seamlessly collected and groomed as ever, his restless night well hidden. To most passing observers they were only two men of a certain age indulging in a little old world leisure on a dreary December morning. They were, at that, but they were also two old fighters feeling each other out, conducting business, brokering a deal that would have global impact -- and that too was common enough in similar meeting rooms in the DC.

Raymond advanced his position and Fitch countered, cool and callus with the ease of long practice and great power. The name Berlin was uttered and briefly discussed, neither willing to admit aloud that they knew nothing, had heard nothing more than murmurs, and they would each have to fall back and work at the opaque knot of the problem with their own resources. The matter of the mole and the incursion was quietly and obliquely put to rest. Though it made Raymond’s nerves tighten and jangle to belie the injustice of it; the sinking sensation that he had perhaps lost that round and wondered how many rounds could he really afford to lose?

And then Lizzy had called and raised the alarm, and though he returned to his careful bartering with Fitch. For a precipitous flight to her side would call far too much attention to the situation, his mind was no longer on the problem and he was sure Fitch sensed it. He wondered, as he tried not to rush back to the car, how he had managed to get in so far over his head.

**

The plan that led him back into Lizzy’s life had first occurred to him as a whim, almost a joke, _wouldn’t it be strange if -- wouldn’t it be funny,_ wouldn’t it fit so well with the deadly sense of irony and retribution that seemed to drive the will and whims of fate that so often seemed to converge on him. 

At times he was sure he was not a man at all but lightning rod, or a descendant of some mythical figure whose ambitions and failures made the old gods take notice of him and raise him up in punish him in turns. And like those ancient creatures of myth he was made to stand proud of the mundane realm and draw to himself a confluence of lawless forces that he must always engage and retreat from and battle and trick and win over in an endless dance.

He had learned early on that he should never dismiss an idea because it seemed insane or dangerous or idiotic. He wasn’t sure a sane idea had passed through his head in the last 20 years. After all, and it was never the idea but the force of will behind it that brought about its success. Sometimes the wildest notion, that appeared as though whispered in his ear by a meddlesome spirit, had led to some of his greatest successes.

This particular convergence seemed significant, more than that -- greater and more final, perhaps, than any other. After all, this concerned the girl he had saved long, long ago and it always happened without fail that when her presence reasserted itself in his life, it was a harbinger of great change, earth-shaking violent change and hadn’t he been feeling himself growing weary? This old dance of his was growing stale, waring, and sickening. Hadn’t he begun to see his fortune, his power for the fool’s gold and painted dross that it was? 

This idea contained all the old figures, himself included, locked as ever, largely unaware, in the slow-moving clockwork of their fatal confrontation. And, as well as those known participants, something new, a rogue planetary body hurtling through his carefully kept stalemates, pulling all of them off their known tracks, spinning them out into something new. 

The change was coming either way. He could feel the gathering breeze of it on on his skin; the awareness of a predator-gaze on the the back of his neck -- when a deal went wrong yet there had been no reason to doubt, when word came back of strange encounters with unknown agents. When faithful allies became skittish and did not want to know him. When his own good foot soldiers kept disappearing without a trace. He knew there was a hard storm approaching whether he acted or didn’t act. 

Why not face it under his own terms. Why not also save the girl again, and see if that might not bring him something better this time. Why not walk atop the surface of the world one last time and keep company again, at long last, with those that belonged there and maybe that would soothe him. Maybe that would give him some sense of purpose.

**

He had prepared to meet Lizzy, stopping to gather up the surveillance materials she had requested, and waited for her at the synagogue. He was there ahead of the appointed time but waiting had never bothered him, it gave him time to distance himself from the need to descend on the Keen household with vengeance in his heart, when they still hoped to keep the imposter from bolting.

He had seen Lizzy become more and more pale and wary, hold herself with more and more tension made of anger and fear, seen her relax beside him as they conferred quietly and then go still with apprehension as she thought ahead to going back home. 

It struck him once, as she’d left him to go back home to have dinner with her husband, that in this agitated state she resembled her mother more than she ever had before -- for he had never known Julia very well. The image he had of her was beauty and grace and the watchful nervousness that came from knowing she was in danger, and could not escape from it, got into bed with it every night. Lizzy, somehow had inherited a gesture he half-recognized from Julia. A way of shoring herself up--straightening her spine and smoothing her face and taking a deep breath before striding right back into harm’s way as though it was her god-given duty to meet it head on. 

But Lizzy had never had the time to learn such a trait from her mother. This was all her, her own unbowing spirit, her own sense of rightness and perseverance. There was nothing about Lizzy that was shrinking or squeamish; though she had a natural empathy that by rights should have burned out of her by that point in her stellar career. When she stood before him and pinned him with her sharp gaze, he knew she saw him, saw right through to the heart of him, and he knew she was standing in judgement. Like Anubis, she was weighing his heart and her word would be law -- his destruction or salvation hung in every real and intangible way on how she rendered her verdict. And when she did render, he would know at last if he would be granted passage, not away to the realm of the dead but be release from it, where he had so long been exiled, still made to walk the long road of ice and snow.

He had waited, past the time when they were to meet, and she never slipped in to sit beside him with her sweet perfume and human presence and reluctant smile to wake him from his cerebral wandering. 

And then he got a phone call.

**

He managed to collect her from the crime scene that had been her house without causing a scene, barely, and she’d been distant, scattered, still reeling. A bruise blossoming on her temple like a stain and a light in her eyes that was far too much like panic for his peace of mind. He’d wanted to go to her, not caring what the FBI lackeys made of it, knowing they all already had their own suspicions. But he’d seen her freeze, glancing between him and Harold and Meera and all the unnamed, unimportant others and he had remembered he must still treat her reputation with care because it was of great value to her and it would smash their hard-won trust if he weren’t to treat it with equal care.

He’d taken her home. He was glad he was staying somewhere with just room enough for the two of them for the time being, rattling around in a big empty house didn’t seem likely to do either of them any good. Isaac had just finished the remodel but had ended up taking on a project in the north of France for at least the next six months and offered Raymond free use of the building while it was disused, on the grounds that it had belonged to him for a time before he sold it on to Isaac. He had remembered the workshop downstairs that was perfect for his current little project and traded up from the pokey little bolt hole he’d been staying in.

He had stood with her, felt her warm and whole and safe under his hands and she had gripped at his coat -- for a second he had thought her hand might rise up higher, might be pulling him in, but he was pulled either way, wasn’t he -- and Lizzy had beamed up at him, giddy with relief and her eyes so soft, so warm, not as a girl looks up at her benefactor but as a woman looks up at a man she’d glad to see. He wondered how he’d earned that fondness, by what other names it might be called he hadn’t dared to think, when all he’d done was turn up and tear her life apart. 

Guilt and hope and longing so fierce it made his lungs burn caused him to withdraw. And added to that a suppressed need to protect, he knew, the need to seek out and fight the man who had threatened what was dear to him, kept him fidgeting and pacing like a caged animal. Eventually Lizzy retreated into her own space and at last he found it easier to breathe. There were many things he was going to have to tell her, soon, perhaps even that night, and now that he’d seen her face bright and alight with affection he wasn’t sure how he was going to go back to seeing her stare him down with sadness and anger.

It had always been a strategy full of risk. In some ways it had been no strategy at all, but a leap into the abyss with the hope that he would figure out what he was doing on the way down. Ever since Garrick’s unfortunate reappearance he’d felt the situation slipping out of his control, he was losing all perspective, and losing track of why perspective was important in the first place. 

He had told her that after, if there was an after, he would stay or go at her word and he had meant it. He meant it with everything in him that was left alive. He listened to the water run in the pipes for her bath and realized that whatever remnants of a plan he had kept had just dissolved around him.

And then she had appeared some hours later, having missed dinner in favour of a long bath and a long nap. She had left the door of her room open so the light from the hall would spill in, and he had been unable to resist the temptation to pass by just once and peer in to see her sleeping soundly, breathing and safe, curled up atop her covers, and the dog had looked up at him from where he also rested, beside her bed as though standing guard. He had switched off the light and let her rest. 

**

It was late and most of the lights in the apartment were off, but he knew he was a long way from sleep. Knowing that she was here, willingly, happily, under his care, filled him with a kind of tenderness and pride that made him want to stay up and savour it, so he sat in the dim living room on the well worn leather couch with one of Isaac’s books. The place was quiet in the way that comes from being the only one awake while everyone else and the world sleeps, and then the air shifted and he looked up and there was Lizzy standing in the doorway. She was was dressed in sleep clothes; a large, soft shirt and leggings, and though the things were loose and modest he could see the shape of her much better than he ever could in her professional daywear. But she was completely unselfconscious, looking down at him with a thoughtful frown. She stepped into the light and he could see that her hair was soft, and disordered from sleep, but her face was awake and alert rather than drowsy. Her cheeks flushed with some unknown emotion and the jut of her chin spoke of determination.

“I think you’re going to have to tell me now,” she said quietly, her voice a little rough from disuse. “How you came to be in my life. All of it, I think you have to tell me all of it.”

**

Liz stood in the silence that fell after her ultimatum. For that’s what it was, worded as gently as she was able. She needed to know. With everything in her she wanted to reach out for him but she could not -- she and Red could not move forward in any way until she knew the whole of what bound them together, the hard facts and the winding suspicions and the intangible bonds that had grown.

For an awful, anticipatory stretch he said nothing. He looked up at her, direct and inscrutable and did not move. Her heart pounded with the realized just what she had demanded.

Red sighed, very slightly, like a tired man coming to face something inevitable. He closed his book and set it on the table. Then he smiled a little smile she had seen before, through the bloody glass of his cage, resigned and reassuring, as if to say _you will be alright, even though we will both soon hurt._ He extended a gesture of invitation to the space beside him.

“Will you come sit with me, Lizzy? It’s a long, strange story and I’m sure you’d rather be comfortable,” he said in that smooth, hypnotic way of his. It was a tone he only used with her, to sooth, she thought, or to reach out. She had stopped doubting that it was anything other than earnestly meant.

She hesitated, pinned by two absolute impulses. To go to him and receive whatever story he had to tell in the companionship that had seemed so easy as they plotted against Tom or to stand aloof, reserving judgement, withholding any trust. 

She went to him. She sat beside him. When he turned to face her head on, she reached out and took his hand, as easily and automatically as if she did it every day. Perhaps it was a remnant of the dream that had woken her. Perhaps it was just that she’d decided to trust her instincts, now that she had little else.

“You’re really going to tell me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, low and grave, “I think it’s time don’t you?”

“It has to be the whole story, Red, start to finish, or we go back to just working together, and I give up on--” she stopped with a fluttery breath and moved paste what she wasn’t ready to admit to, “You have to tell me everything, Red. I deserve that.”

His fingers tightened around her so hard it hurt for a second, his thumb stroking her knuckles.

“I can’t tell you everything, Lizzy. Some of the details, some of the names I have to keep to myself. I know you, my dear girl, I know you would march out into the dark to fight them, to try and tear them all down, and I can’t let that happen just yet.”

“I wouldn’t,” she protested, annoyed he thought her such a loose cannon.

“You would, I know you would. But that’s alright, that fire in you, that drive is a beautiful thing. I hope you always would,” he smiled at her, not the fake charm he used on his clientele but warm and gentle -- she felt her face grow hot with the close sweetness of it.

“I will tell you everything I can,” he continued, “And I promise you, everything I tell you is the absolute truth.”

“Alright,” She said, fidgeting their fingers together nervously, “Start with me then, how did you come to know me?”

“Oh, Lizzy,” he said, his voice strained as though she’d touched a raw nerve, or questioned something absolutely fundamental, “For your story and mine, that’s where it all starts.”


	10. cracking open, fearful

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who ever would have thought we would have reached chapter 10? Not me that's for sure. And this is the last part of The Chapter That Would Not End (ie 8, 9 & 10) with all of it's important back story and mytharc. We are come now to the _Big Reveal._
> 
> I feel like this is a good time to remind you all that this story is completely AU. I started working on mytharc theory last December, and continued to work on it for months. Berlin parts 1 & 2 have made me even more AU than i started out, but I honestly really liked my version of events and I decided to stick it out. In the end, I don't know how much I improved the situation, but I think I added at least a little bit of agency to Liz's mother's narrative. 
> 
> Warning: this chapter contains implied violence against women and children. You knew this already of course, but it's talked about it more directly here and I thought it fair to warn you. I know I find it difficult to write.
> 
> My next updates will be slower in coming, I'm sorry to say, but they will move the story forward at a greater rate now that you all are grounded in this AU. This chapter is unbeta'd and all mistakes are my own.

_Oh you creatures of endless hope_   
_who wear but do not soften_   
_even when faced with days limned by fire,_   
_cracking open, fearful, like fallen jars,_   
_the spoiled promise of preserves vouchsafed_   
_by fruitful seasons that once walked broad and mild_   
_now made over in dust and withered cane,_

_\-- War Winter (we go on)_

**

So he told her. Slowly, painstakingly through the course of the longest winter’s night, he brought out the pieces of the story and laid them out before her, so she could inspect each one and test it’s weight and it’s clarity.

He told her of becoming the protege of a very powerful man, a man who turned out to be several magnitudes more powerful than his rank and position would lead any bystander to believe. A man who stood together with a handful men in positions equally powerful -- or moreso -- at the center of a web, a coalition, a vast network that was unseen and unknown but had a hand in influencing most of the pieces on the board in the Western World, and even now their power was spreading outward. 

But he hadn’t known any of that as a young sailor. He was just a man who was good at his job, grim though it sometimes was, whose boss liked him. He’s been proud, expected imminent advancement.

Then his commanding officer’s wife had sought him out, cornered him for a few minutes at a party at his commander’s house for friends and colleagues and their wives and kids. She pulled him aside in the cover of the commotion and begged him to listen, begged him to meet again.

“I’ve seen you, you’re his favorite, his current pet project,” Julia had told him, “I think you’re a good man and I don’t think _he’s_ corrupted you yet, but he will if you give him a chance. You’ll be in over your head so fast you won’t even know what happened. It happened to me. I need your help. My daughter needs your help. Please just listen. And please don’t tell anyone or my life is in danger.”

And she was lovely and graceful, with the biggest, deepest blue eyes, and panicked, he recognized her very real desperation, and also the steel in her that would not give out. So he did the decent thing, and met with her again, and didn’t tell anyone, planning to hear her out and see if her claims were valid -- and then, most likely he would go to his commanding officer and get her the help that she needed. He’d never really believed she was as out of touch with reality as the rumours made out, and just that touch of doubt made him keep quiet, just in case she really was under threat.

The story Julia had to tell was a horror.

**

“Are you sure you want to hear all of this, Lizzy?,” he asked, pausing in the tale and coming back to the present to study her face, “What your father did to your mother is a very hard thing to hear.”

“I need to know it. I have to,” she had stood then, restless with nervous energy and sick dread, and went to peer out the windows between the curtains, not knowing what else to do with herself, though her eyes took in nothing beyond the glass. “Please, go on. I’ll tell you if i need you to stop.”

**

Julia, Liz’s mother, had married a man she loved and he had turned rotten on her -- or rather revealed himself as what he’d been all along. He was a charismatic man with no natural empathy, driven only by his own ambition and his need to control everything around him. He changed from charming and attentive, to demanding, selfish, manipulative, cool most of the time with busts of fury that was aimed at her, and sometimes spilled over on their little daughter. 

He wasn’t violent, she said, not often, not always. And anyway it wasn’t being handled a little rough that worried her the most, though she hated it and grew to hate him. No, it was the coldness in him that frightened her. She was sure, she said, that if she crossed him, if she tried to leave, he would kill her.

She’d had to turn watchful, vigilant, always aware of her husband and her surroundings. And in her careful creeping, she’d accidentally overheard a couple conversations in her husband’s study, and they had worried her. They had sounded all wrong. So she had started poking through her husband’s things when he was away with his work -- which he was for great lengths of time when he was on assignment -- she’d found things in his papers. She’d found a bank book, for an account hadn’t known he kept with the kind of money in it that terrified, her because it couldn’t have been honestly earned. 

She started keeping track of what faces came around for a ‘casual drink’ late at night when her husband sent her off to bed as soon as they appeared. She had done her research and she had found nothing good. But she knew no one would believe her, after all he was a respected man, and more than that his allies were powerful and even more respected, and she was just an unstable housewife in the eyes of the law.

She knew her husband was not a good man, that was dangerous not just to her but to everyone in his sphere of influence -- and that, she said, was endless. She wanted to get away from him, take her little girl and go somewhere safe. But she didn’t know how she could possibly do that when her husband’s reach stretched around the world with the weight of so many official channels behind him. Her only hope was to take him down but she didn’t know how to do that either. She was trapped.

Her only hope was her husband’s young protege -- maybe he wasn’t tied into it yet, maybe he could use his access, maybe he would do the right thing.

She had pressed a stack of handwritten notes and bad photo-copies into Red’s hands, and rushed off home to pick up her daughter from preschool, leaving him to sit in the little cafe and pour over everything. He didn’t want to believe it, but it had the awful ring of truth. He wanted to go to the authorities, he wasn’t even sure which ones, but Julia had made him promise to tell no one, she was sure her life was on the line, and he was beginning to be inclined to believe it.

He’d looked into it on his own and confirmed what she’d found, and more, but only in the most roundabout ways. Nothing could definitely be tied back to the man in question or his cohorts, and as he looked, the few tracks he’d found were erased as though they’d never been. In the end he was left only with his own suspicion, a taint that coloured his promising career, and the memory of the real mortal fear in the face of his commander’s wife.

**

“Were you in love with her?” asked Liz as he paused, afraid of the answer, not wanting to hear she was nothing more than an extension of some long buried feelings for her mother.

“No. I was in love with my wife, though our marriage was maybe not what I… it was more difficult than I like to remember at times,” he told her, blunt and definite and she was relieved. 

“I was not in love with your mother,” He continued, “It was something more insidious than that, something full of much more ego. I thought I could save her. I thought I could swoop in and bring a bad man to justice and free a captive woman and her little child.”

**

It was slow going and he moved very carefully, but no one was any the wiser. They’d trained him for intelligence work after all and he was a prodigy. But he had no case and could prove nothing. He might have been a young man on the rise but he held no real power, yet. He’d run out of avenues to pursue, began to doubt his own intuition.

He had his own wife to look after, his own daughter. He didn’t want to do anything that would hurt them, or disrupt their lives. He didn’t want to worry them. He wanted them to be happy and safe. For a time he put aside his investigations and began to live his life again. But his eyes were open, and now he saw that not all of the things they were ordered to do were ordered for the right reasons. He could no longer serve out all his missions without wondering if the reasons behind it were for the good of the country or the advancement of the fortune and power of one man and his friends.

His conscience gnawed at him. He couldn’t sleep easily and he couldn’t tell Sarah why. 

In time Julia contacted him again, wanting to know what progress he’d made. He didn’t have much good to tell her. She made it clear she and her daughter needed to get out. She couldn’t stand living in perpetual fear anymore and she didn’t want her daughter living that way either. They couldn’t wait. They needed to leave now, and do it so they would never, ever be found. They needed to do it so there were trails leading in opposite directions, so that Julia and Lizzy, as her mother called her, could never be found. 

But they were up against a very powerful man, and they had few resources, and no plan is foolproof.

Raymond was aware with every step farther in that he was putting himself in danger, and he was putting his young family in danger. But at the same time, he was a father, he knew what it was to worry about a child before anything else. How could he abandon another person’s daughter to the winds of fate? 

They hatched a plan. The little girl would be got out first. She had turned five that autumn, old enough that it was possible to move her separately from her mother -- and that was vital because a girl alone was easy to hide and a woman alone almost as easy, but a woman and a girl together would be far easier to recognize and track. 

**  
“Wait,” she interrupted, alarmed, “Autumn? My birthday’s in May.”

“I’m sorry, Lizzy,” he said, and he really did sound pained, full of remorse, but that didn’t help the sinking feeling of realizing that almost nothing she knew about herself was true. He’d been right all along. “Sam and I had to change many of the details when making your new identity. I always thought that was especially cruel, but it was necessary to hide you away.”

“But my name is really my name, right? I couldn’t have forgotten that could I?” she asked, sounding desperate and not caring. Something of her had to be real and permanent. She wasn’t willing to be stripped of all identity. Even if her name had been changed, she nearly hoped he would lie and tell her it hadn’t, or she was sure she would collapse into nothingness.

“Yes, absolutely yes. You were born Elizabeth, and unless you want to change it, Elizabeth you shall remain,” he reassured, and hesitated, something obviously bothering him. “You were introduced to me as Lizzy, all those years ago. It’s a hard habit to change, but would you really like it better if I called you Liz?”

A little late to worry about that now, she thought, and looked over at him sharply, seeing he was sincere, maybe even a little chagrined. She considered it, not carefully, her mind in too much disarray. Tom had called her Liz and she hoped he never would again. Red called her Lizzy and it had driven her up the wall at first, it was so personal, intrusive, but now, now she would much rather be his Lizzy and he would be her Red, not the terror and the masquerade, the general of the invisible war, but the man. The man who was friend and protector though it defied all rational sense. 

“No,” she said at last, casually, belieing it’s vital importance, “Lizzy’s fine.”

** 

Julia would go to her sister and her fiance’s in New York State, by train for a long weekend, under the pretence of wedding planning, and thus a solid alibi was made. Her sister, who knew the danger, would swear it being a normal visit, that nothing was amiss, and give Julia a few days lead time.

Raymond would sneak in one dark winter’s night and help the child escape. Then he would take the girl to meet her mother in a distant location and the three of them would make the long drive out to Raymond’s old brother-in-arms, Sam. Sam who had been a mentor and friend to him, Sam who had felt something souring in the air around their unit and had retired from the Navy when his tour was up, who had planned to settle down with the woman he thought he was going to marry and have a family, Sam who came from a cold, stifling home where he and his sister had basically raised each other and who wanted a big, warm family somewhere quiet to make up for the lack. He was the only person Raymond knew who was comfortably out of view of the major players, and he was happy to look after the girl for a while, with the help of his girlfriend Maggie.

It wasn’t supposed to be forever, at the time, just long enough that it would be safe for Julia to come and get her. 

**

“You’re being so careful to leave out the names, but I have your files,” she said at one point, putting off thinking about the implications of this tale, “I have all your files from the Post Office because Cooper wanted me to do a profile while you were still… away, so I could just look it all up.”

“Lizzy,” he said, weary and faintly exasperated, “Do you really think the files haven’t been doctored, and a very long time ago? Do you really think these people would be that careless?”

“But they couldn’t -- it was hardly the dark ages, people were keeping track.”

“Oh, yes, they very easily could. Haven’t I always said that everything about me is a lie? What exactly did you think I meant?”

**

“I was so young then, just a stripling, a boy. I didn’t know it, though. I thought I was a brave knight riding in to right all wrongs. I thought my honor and courage would save me and reward me. It’s a wonder your mother trusted me at all, but she was desperate and she had no other avenues of escape, not with what her husband was. Looking back, it’s amazing the plan worked as well as it did,” he shook his head, watching it unfold all over again in his memory, hazy with time and all the traumas that had passed since.

Liz had returned to perch beside him, unable to venture far from the lure of his low voice, but uneasy, somehow frightened of the story he told, sure that more horrors waited within it that she suddenly didn’t really want to face. She had demanded these answers over and over, and now she thought she saw why he hadn’t relented. He hadn’t done it simply to string her along, to keep her interested. He’d been kind. He’d known that she had needed to keep her wits about to to survive Tom. He hadn’t wanted to dismantle her whole sense of self.

“Now that I’ve gotten to know you, Lizzy,” he continued, interrupting her thoughts, “As you are, I hardly think of that little girl I met that night more than twenty-five years ago. She was very brave. And she refused to leave without her teddy bear, this floppy, ratty bear almost scuppered the whole endeavor. But she was you Lizzy, I came and stole you away.”

“You were the man in the shadows. You were the man in the car,” she said as though testing out the concept and leaned forward and inspected his face as though she might be able to recognize it from her own past, but she couldn’t. He was just Red, beloved but not familiar in that way. She might have recently found some dim silhouettes in her memory but she couldn’t connect them to his present self or hers. 

“You remember?” he said, clearly surprised.

“Maybe. Not really. It was something in a dream,” she paused and thought of the little picture of Young Sam and Young Red that she’d found, but even that young face didn’t mean anything to her. It was far too long ago, and her early years had always been alarmingly diffuse to her, but his story sounded so similar to what had been appearing in her subconscious mind -- And she didn’t believe he would lie to her, not now, not tonight when dishonesty would break them both.

“So why didn’t she come back?” she asked at last “Why didn’t she ever come and get me?”

But she knew there could only be one answer, or else why would such a devoted mother abandon her child forever and ever in a stranger’s care, however trustworthy he turned out to be?

**

The girl had been delivered safely to her would-be temporary home and Raymond had gone back to his life, with his new pretense that nothing had changed while he continued to work to uncover the web that surrounded his boss, and Julia got a call at her sister’s house that her daughter had disappeared from her bed. The calls had been answered by Julia’s sister, of course, taking advantage of the similarity of their voices.

Julia was reported as having failed to return home from her sister’s, though in truth she’d been on the road a few days earlier. It was done, she too had disappeared.

Raymond didn’t know what happened to her for the next three years and would never know. He made very little progress with his own investigations. He had his career to maintain, and sometimes he even forgot that any of the other, darker truths were real. Other times he was painfully aware that he was working the career he once valued above anything else as a cover, as a means of access. 

It took him years, but eventually he had a slim notebook if damning facts he could finally show someone to prove his case. Even then he did not understand how conspiracy stretched, he trusted the wrong authorities to be impartial and incorruptible and planned to bring his information forward. 

It was only as a precaution that he sent his wife and daughter away to his grandparent’s old place in the country and started the process of turning in the man who’d made him protege. He planned to join them later, and celebrate the holidays in joy and relief of a job well done.

It was then that there came another of the fateful confluences of unstoppable events. 

Julia had lived so carefully for so long, had fallen down into crushing, debilitating depression over the separation from her daughter, her desperate circumstances -- and begun to climb out again. She became sure the she was out from under the threat of her former husband and his connections. She sought out her daughter, hoping to make a home with her at long last. But she was not free and safe, she had been watched all that long while by patient minions waiting to see where she had stashed the girl.

She saw her daughter once, from a distance, and talked briefly with the man who had become the girl’s adopted father. Then she was caught. 

The girl’s father sent men to steal back the girl, once more in the middle of the night. Sam fought them off, and somehow the house was set ablaze. The girl tried to open her bedroom door and her hand was burnt on the handle. She called for her Daddy but he was fighting off the men who’d come for her. She climbed out the window of her second floor bedroom to the porch roof and fell trying to climb down the drainpipe -- hit her head. Never had a clear recollection of that night, or the day before it, or even the day after it in the hospital, where Sam had rushed her as soon as he found her on the ground outside after desperately searching the house. 

She and Sam and Aunt Judy, and her cousins moved to Nebraska immediately after that, on the insurance money from the house. Sam’s business changed, that too, moving underground.

Action was taken on the report Raymond had turned in, not towards justice but towards obfuscation. Transfers were made, reports were changed, tracks were wiped away.

The man whose daughter he’d stolen made the connection between the records the young man had kept and the things his wife had said before she died. If he’d simply been a nuisance they would have killed him, no matter what failsafes he’d put in place -- and he had, he’d at least been canny enough to know that he should -- or who his father was, but since he had wronged his commander so personally, he was punished instead. He was left alive and made to suffer. He was discredited and made harmless -- or so they thought -- and robbed of something of equal value.

They made him into a traitor. They sent him underground. They took his Sarah and his Abby and left so much blood -- He had hurried to meet them on Christmas eve, thinking his work was accomplished, that justice for the guilty and corrupt was on it’s way down from on high.

He found so much blood. And a little baby tooth. He looked all over the house and all around the house, in the fields, in the old Meadow, even digging in the snow, and he found nothing more of them. Not even blood. Not even tracks. They were gone.

He knew they could not still live, he knew it. But he didn’t know it, somehow he still didn’t know it, somehow for a half second at a time, once every few years he believed he might still find them. Or his daughter, at least, because after all, who could kill a little child? 

But that hope was a sweet madness, and it hurt him as much as it spurred him on. 

The time after that, months, more than a year, more than two, was a wreck of pain of confusion that he could never clearly remember, could never even put the events in a solid order. All of it hurt. All of it was impossible. It was impossible that he was even alive. He thought at times it would be better if he weren’t, but though they’d taken everything else, he still had that information in his head, and that was to valuable to waste on death. And he still had contacts on the ground, even if he used to know them from the other side of the law. 

He lived. He found a benefactor, or rather a benefactor found him. He planned to make his own justice. 

**

The story had taken hours to tell, most of the night. Sometimes he spoke so slowly, paused for so long that she thought he wasn’t going to continue. She had looked over at him, once, as he hesitated and saw his face so full of pain, as though he had to dredge each word from deep within himself, as if each word cut him as he spoke it. She turned away, kept her eyes focused on nothing, the dark distance, and gave him what privacy she could. 

Liz listed, spellbound and horrified by everything she heard, but not disbelieving. She knew he wouldn’t lie to her this way, and that no lie could cause him this much agony. She tried to absorb and understand, but it was too big, and too strange, and it felt like the air was getting so thin, and she was vibrating all the way through with nerves and confusion -- as though the danger in his tale had been invited into the room and might soon attack.

She had started out with his hand in hers, comforting and warm, but she was too restless, they were both were, to sit comfortably, as though the size of the history that was between them kept forcing them opposite ends of the room. She had paced, and then she had perched on the edge of the her seat as though she had been on the verge of flight. He had paced, he had sat beside her, he had stood, distant from her, peering out into the night between the thin white curtains.

In the end, dizzy with the facts of her past reforming around her, she had settled on the floor, her back pressed hard into the front of the couch, her knees bent, staring at the corner of the coffee table as she tried to weather the revelations that had poured down on her.

She pressed a hand to her forehead and reminded herself to breathe. She heard Red leave the room and rustle around in the kitchen and return. She didn’t look up. She made a strangled sort of noise, somewhere between distress and relief and a tortured kind of irony. She had finally gotten what she’d asked for. She hadn’t really expected a nice story, had she? Well. Now she knew.

Red sat very carefully on the couch beside her, his knee and her shoulder touched. A balloon glass of amber liquid extended into her field of vision, and after a moment’s hesitation she took it from him.

“Not my usual choice, but it’s what dear old Isaac had in his cupboard. Sip it nicely now, it’s the good stuff,” he told her quietly. His voice was hoarse and dry from overuse. She heard him sip his own drink and sigh, like he was the tiredest man alive.

“Do I really look like I need a drink?” she asked, trying for humour but her voice sounded wrong, too.

“You look like you need several, but there’s every chance you’re going to be called in to talk about Tom Keen tomorrow. I don’t think a hangover would help our cause.”

“Oh, god. That was just today, wasn’t it? Or yesterday now, I guess.”

It was, in fact, a very nice brandy, she found after a shaky sip, but the acid made her stomach hurt. She was fairly sure she would drink it anyway. _Too much,_ she thought, _it’s far, far too much for two people to bare. I don’t think it’ll work. We’ll go crazy._

“You must hate me,” she said, a hard, desperate whisper, “How is it you don’t hate me? Me for her doesn’t seem like a fair trade.”

“I think maybe I did for a short while, but only because I hated everything. I hated myself. I hated everything that continued on and kept breathing when they were gone. But how can you resent a little child?” he said this as though he were sorry for admitting to it, but hadn’t she asked for the truth? “And like I told you before, Lizzy… you were the one good thing, I had helped to keep you safe,” he continued on, rushing to make himself understood, not to let her think there might still be any bad feeling, “And if you were happy and well, maybe that helped to balance out all the other sins I have committed. And now I know the real you, not as a good deed or a symbol, but as a truly remarkable person… ” He stopped, seemingly unsure what to say.

She wondered idly if anyone else had ever gotten the whole tale from him, or if she was the only one. She had a feeling she knew the answer to that one all on her own.

“You were the thing to come out that wreck largely unharmed. All I wanted was to continue to protect you, like some mysterious benefactor, I suppose… and that way it wouldn’t all have happened entirely for nothing. Because you really are something, Lizzy,” he told her, after some time, after some careful, calming breaths, “Someone precious. But even in that I wasn’t careful enough.”

She thought of Tom, and wondered for the thousandth time about the person-or-organization Berlin who had sent him. She wondered if they would ever catch up with her husband and wring that information out of him. She wondered how Berlin could have known enough of their tangled history to know she was important enough to target. To know that she could be used to lure out Red, when she’d had no idea.

She wondered if she ever would have met Red, have ever even seen his face as a grown woman if it hadn’t been for Tom conniving his way into her life. She had a feeling she knew the answer to that one, too. 

**

When Red had spoken of finding his family, or not finding them -- finding gore instead, in his old family home where he had thought them safe, she couldn’t even picture the pain, the fear and grief of it. 

Her mind turned towards the image, still fresh in her mind, of the woman and the girl that Eric Trettle had murdered and mutilated to stand in for his own wife and child, the two lifeless figures on the floor of that nice, clean house. All the blood, and the smell of it, the dark glisten of it. She pictured walking into a house she thought was her home, on a night where she had expect to celebrate, and finding that instead -- and worse. 

It was a wonder he was still standing. It was a wonder his mind was the quick, sharp, brilliant thing it was, not turned in on itself and lost down a maze of grief. Or maybe it was, she realized, maybe, in some ways, he was still finding his way back.

**

“Which is not to say I’m an innocent, Lizzy,” he had warned her, at one point that night, “Just because they fabricated my first offence, that doesn’t make me innocent of all the others. You must never forget that. I am not a good man, I’m selfish and I’m dangerous. I’m not a tender man -- I might have been once, sometimes I can remember, but not now. I don’t have any mercy.”

“I know,” she said in the smallest, quietest voice, because she knew -- intellectually she knew that it was true. But her whole chest hurt with the longing to protest, because he was tender with her, and careful, and patient, and told her the truth. He might not be a good man, but he was good to her. 

She knew that made her selfish, to value that above all his other crimes, but she couldn’t help it. He was frustrating and he was unpredictable, but to her, he was kind.

 

**

She’d been keeping the little picture close, though she didn’t question or articulate why. It was a reassuring token, and yet also a troubling one but she had puzzles enough to dog her days that she let this one small indulgence stand without giving it much thought. It came with her out of that house in an interior pocket of her coat that had been left in the car, and mostly she was glad that the agents taking apart the house never saw it.

She thought maybe it was her good luck charm, leading her to the truth over and over. Maybe that wasn’t so much luck, because the knowing had hurt her. Knowing, she realized, had endangered her life and also saved her, both at once. 

After a long time in silence, as she sat on the floor and finished her measure of brandy, she thought of the picture again. She set her glass aside and struggled to her feet, her bruised body wanting to rebel, and rushed back to her room to retrieve it from her coat.

When she returned, Red was still and slumped and lost in thought as if he thought she’d run off from him again, as if he didn’t expect her back. She saw him rub a hand over his face and behind his neck, slumping forward even further. It was strange the way, even now, in the midst of everything else, she was captivated by the line of his nose, the fan of his lowered eyelashes. This used to frighten her, the pull she felt, but she’d begun to accept it as unalterable -- and the least of her worries.

She stopped and stood in front of him, and then consciously sat herself next to him, abrupt and intruding in his space. She held up the little snapshot. Sam, Raymond and the girl, who must have been his Abby, tiny and captured on paper.

“Here,” she said, waiting for him to acknowledge her and take it, and didn’t look at him because she felt her throat closing up with tears and didn’t want him to see, “Sam kept this, I found it in his things. I thought… I thought you might like to have it.”

He slid it out of her fingers, as careful as it were a precious, ancient relic. And it was. She heard him take a ragged breath and pressed her shoulder hard against his. There were tears running down her face and she wasn’t even sure why and she didn’t bother to wipe them away.

“I’m sure you’d prefer,” he said, and cleared his throat, “I bet you wish he’d been the one to show up last August.”

“No,” she said, definite, almost insulted, but she knew he was trying not to dwell on the other aspects of the picture, “No, I wouldn’t prefer him. I don’t know him. I know you.”

He was quiet again, and upset and lost in thought, and she had no idea how to comfort him, or if she should even try -- or how she’d come from barely tolerating his presence those months ago to wanting nothing more than to make him stop hurting. 

“Thank you,” he said, at length, “I didn’t have any pictures of her.”

**

Morning came far too early. She hadn’t gotten any more sleep, but Red had sent her off eventually to get a few hours rest. She’d gone along with the idea because her head felt full and her heart was racing and he was right, Cooper would almost certainly be calling her in to give official statements. It was going to be humiliating enough without being too exhausted to speak.

The day began clear and bright and dry and freezing, the promised cold snap coming through -- and her head still felt too full and her sense of reality had warped, maybe at last irreparably. But the world was continuing on as though nothing had changed. And nothing had changed, not in fact, it was just that now she knew, and she hadn’t known before and she had to get used to a new perspective. 

And Hudson was whining and yipping and needing his morning walk and his breakfast, and there was a message on her phone, a firm request for her presence at the Post Office at ten. She got up. She went on.


	11. and it teases your head

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liz struggles to cope with all that she'd learned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have very mixed feelings about this chapter, but on the other hand I don't know how I would do it differently. This is kind of a 'close my eye, cross my fingers and post' chapter, and I really want to know how you respond to it and if it makes sense to you all.
> 
> This chapter is unbated and all mistakes are mine. I apologize for it's shortness, but looking ahead to the next good breaking point, this would have been more than twice as long, which is unreasonable even for me! I will do my best to get the next update in a week or two, and for the moment I am sticking with my estimate of ~15 chapters in all.

_And I said I know it well_

_That secret that you knew_  
_But don't know how to tell_  
_It fucks with your honor_  
_And it teases your head_  
_But you know that its good girl_  
_'Cos its running you with red_

_Then the snow started falling..._

_\-- Blood Bank, Bon Iver_

**

Sometime in the afternoon, Liz was given a break from the questioning and left to sit alone in the interview room for a long time. She couldn’t say exactly how long because her phone had gone dead, she’d hardly thought to plug it in the night before, and there was no clock on the wall. They liked interrogatees disoriented. 

And disoriented she was, but not because she wasn’t sure how far past lunch time it was. Everything she had learned the night before, everything Red had told her kept shambling around in her head, even as she answered questions and gave her statements and profiled Tom at the demand of the unfamiliar agent who was supposed to be the unbiased interviewer. He was called Darrow or Darren or Daryl, she wasn’t sure which but he looked at her so coldly, with such scorn and dismissiveness and perhaps even pity that she was sure he thought she was just some gullible woman who’d been conned. That she hadn’t really deserved her spot on the team, that she was guiltless but stupid and easily seduced. 

At first she answered his questions easily, mechanical and indifferent because she knew this one Agent’s opinion of her didn’t matter. She knew she’d done the best she could, and she knew she had Cooper’s good opinion on her side, and the weight of how much they needed her to keep Red on side even if everything else failed her. The shape of her past, newly discovered kept playing and replaying itself in her mind, filling her ears with a soft white noise that made it hard to give the questions she was asked her full attention. But the Darrow or Darryl’s smirking, patronizing condescension wore at her distraction, at her temper, at her small remaining portion of rational self-control. Soon she was furious, glaring up at her interviewer and speaking through a clenched jaw, ready to shout or fly at him if he made one more insinuation about her intentions with her husband or her relationship with Red.

“I was right about Tom,” she bit out, at last, “I turned him in once and you all did your dance and cleared him and _sent him back home for me to deal with._ All I did was look after myself and try to do my job. All I did was what you should have done in the first place and discover that he wasn’t what he said he was.”

The agent hadn’t had anything with which to reply to that so he told her stay put and left her without further explanation. She sat. She waited. She looked over at the one way glass and wondered if she were being observed, if she might pace away her fury without it being seen as a sign of guilty nerves. She tried to picture herself back in the white-and-gold-nautilus apartment, in her little borrowed room and the feeling of being cared for and protected that she’d known there, but in the grey and fluorescent interview room it was a difficult image to conjure or keep.

Eventually the door opened, and it wasn’t Agent Darryl or Derren come back for another round, but Meera, with a friendly smile on her face and a paper to go cup in each hand.

“Come with me a minute, will you?” said Meera, holding out one the the cups to her, which she eagerly stood to take, “Cooper wants to see you in a few but I thought you might rather wait in my office rather than this fish bowl.”

Liz thanked her quietly and warmed her hands around the hot paper cup as they walked through the maze of the interrogation level of the blacksite and back up the flight of steps to the office level. Once they were ensconced safely in her temporary partner's office, she was free to pace as much as she liked, though she knew she looked manic and ragged and caged. She sipped at her drink and found it wasn’t coffee at all, but peppermint hot chocolate and she stopped and looked up at Meera in surprise.

“You looked about ready to crawl out of your skin when I looked in earlier,” explained Meera, “I didn’t think caffeine would be a kindness. Look, I’ve worked with John Darrow in the past and he may be a bastard and a card carrying member of the old boys club, but he’s got the respect of the higher-ups and he’s slipped me word off the record that while oversight is not at all crazy about you going off the reservation like that, you’ve got nothing to worry about. No one believes you’re in collusion with Tom Keen.”

Liz nodded slowly, the relief she should have felt failing to manifest, a hollow frustration echoing in it’s place. She noticed, also, that Meera didn’t say that no one thought she was in collusion with Red, but that was an open secret now, wasn’t it? She was in collusion with Red, and she’d handed over a ream of surveillance photos of Tom that his people had taken, and she’d admitted to accepting his help with investigating her husband because it would only dig her in deeper to lie. But oversight needed Red, and to keep Red they needed her, so for the moment the balance still hung in her favour, no matter what indiscretions the knew or suspected she’d committed. 

“Good,” she said, “That’s good to know. Thanks, Meera. I mean, really thank you, Meera, I… I really needed hot chocolate right now.” She smiled, awkward and aware it had been a very long time since she’d had a casual, friendly conversation with anyone -- and that now, with all of her trauma and poor judgement out in the open, she would likely go much longer without. 

Suddenly she wanted to say it, divulge what she had just newly learned, so that somebody else in the world might know and understand beyond the microcosm of her and Red. _My father murdered my mother,_ she wanted to say, _he tricked her and he murdered her and he murdered another man’s family and that’s why my life holds this shape, why you’ve all been landed here -- and I nearly followed in her footsteps._

The words were there, waiting, piled up on her tongue and trying to tumble out but she looked at Meera and thought of her little kids at home, her husband, her dog, her career -- her life that was in many way so similar to what Liz had once wished for herself, and she knew she must not speak. She and Meera might work in the same place, work towards the same ends, but Liz knew she stood in a different world, had passed through a gateway yesterday and had entered it or returned to it, having been born there and only accidentally allowed to leave for a time. Meera and her colleagues might not yet see it but she was already gone from them, she could feel it, she could feel herself cut off from them and their career-and-family driven lives and the way they weren’t stripped down to sheer survival instinct and the ungiving awareness of the hard, ravenous, deadly nature of the realms that waited just out of sight. She’d lost her fractional purchase on the real world. She finally understood the malignancy of the taint that had been tied to all her life, lingering just out of the corner of her eye and making its presence felt even when she hadn’t known what it was. 

She saw no reason to draw anyone else down into the wreck of it unless it was absolutely necessary. She sipped at her cocoa and went back to pacing.

“I just wanted to say,” began Meera, sounding more uncertain and grave than Liz was used to hearing her, “I interrogated Tom Keen, or whoever the hell he is, and I signed off on him -- there was no evidence and there were no cracks in the facade and that damn box led right back to Reddington’s door, but I should have seen through that because it was all a little too perfect, wasn’t it? I shouldn’t have dumped him right back in your lap. I’m sorry, Liz.”

She looked down at Meera, who was perched against the edge of her desk, not meeting her eye. Liz wasn’t upset about that, not really. Tom was a very good operative, how could she fault Meera for getting fooled when she’d spent days on end with the man, she’d gone to bed with him, and felt shamed by his apparent goodness and generosity in the face of her apparent selfishness, when she’d willed herself to love him and had once promised to start a family with him and never once seen a hole in the charade until it was far, far too late. It was Meera’s job but it had been her job, too, to know people and see inside of them, and more than her job, it had been her life. Tom Keen had fooled them all. 

“It’s alright,” was all she said, calm and sad and sorry, slowing to a stop at last, “I don’t blame you. You couldn’t have known.”

**

Red had been asleep when she was getting ready for the day, or at least holed up in the privacy of his room at the end of the long, turning, hallway, leaving the place eerily quiet and still. By the time she had dressed and bundled up enough to take Hudson for his walk, Dembe had knocked on the front door and let himself in. They talked in low voices, both instinctively protective of the possibility that Red was resting near by, and he’d kindly explained how to work the alarm systems and showed her where the coffee things were kept in the gleaming, unblemished kitchen. 

She and Dembe walked Hudson together. He had offered and she thought it wise to accept his company considering she didn’t know the neighborhood. She also realized that Dembe wouldn’t have intruded if he didn’t think she was genuine need of escort. The didn’t really talk, but it was a comfortable silence, with Hudson trotting eagerly ahead of them. She knew she should bring her dog back to heel but she was groggy and all her bruises and joints were aching. She wasn’t up to giving Hudson the long, brisk walk he needed so she let him wear himself out by scooting ahead. 

It was a brilliant, clear day with a cutting, icy breezy. It felt just like winter. She’d known it would be cold, and that’s how she had justified it to herself when she picked up Red’s smooth grey scarf from where he’d left it on the dining table and looped it around her neck as she was heading out the door. She wondered if Dembe had noticed just whose it was, what he thought of her becoming such a presence in Red’s life. She wondered just when it had started mattering to her if she were accepted by Red’s associates.

She’d left Hudson in Dembe’s care for the day, in the end. Red wasn’t up and making his presence known when they got back to the apartment and she didn’t want her dog digging through a stranger’s things all day unsupervised. Dembe had very gently suggested Hudson come back down with him after his breakfast, most likely wanting to give his employer all the time to rest that he could, and Liz agreed with great relief. 

She realized as she walked down to her car that as much as she hated the idea, she would still have to enact the contingency plan for Hudson, at least until she had somewhere more stable to settle in. Even after every last thing had changed that seemed possible, there were still more changes barreling through.

**

Cooper spoke with her briefly and warned her in no uncertain terms that any more off the books investigations would get her security clearance revoked and sent her home. Except not to her home because the Keen house was still considered a crime scene. The Post Office team would be investigating her husband, and she was not to get involved because she was too close to the situation -- which was code for too likely to go off like a loose canon. She protested about getting benched again, terrified of being made to sit by, idly enduring, while Tom was out there getting up to god knew what, but Cooper would have none of it.

“You look like hell, Agent Keen, and that’s me being polite. Go rest up and get you head on straight. You’re nothing but a liability to the team in this state,” he told her, in that stern and paternal tone he used with her lately which meant he thought he was doing this for her own good, “Come back in a few days and get caught up on your paperwork. But you cannot be a part of the Tom Keen investigation.”

So she drove back to the apartment in some kind of angry stupor, fueled by sugar and adrenaline and the stark realization that she had no idea what to do with herself if she didn’t have Tom’s investigation to focus on. Not that she believed any threats Cooper made about her security clearance. She knew the deal with Red fell apart without her -- and even after all she’d learned she still wasn’t sure if Red was more driven to stand by that arrangement because of any attachment to her or because he refused look weak in the contest of wills he was engaged in with Cooper and Fowler and the rest. But she had no idea where to start without Tom there in front of her to keep an eye on. All they really had, so far was a name whispered on the wind and the certainty that there was a lot of money and planning behind whatever organization was involved.

And if she didn’t have Tom and the investigation to focus on, she would have to think about everything else. About the real story of her origins, about the way it felt as if she’d lost her dad all over again, as though he’d been forced away from her even in memory by what she now about the family that had made her. About the way Sam had given up so very much just for her. 

He’d wanted a normal life, he’d wanted to marry Maggie and have kids and a normal job and a partner in life. Somehow she hadn’t really thought about it that way before, it was too much a part of her habits of not looking and not remembering. She hardly even remembered Maggie, just that she hadn’t liked her, had found her pushy and cloying. But then, she’d hardly even like Sam back then, although it didn’t make sense to her when she tried to remember how it had been back then. She’d been a furious, sullen little thing who refused to like anything or anybody after her world had been turned upside down. 

But Sam had been good and patient and kind and a little bit stern sometimes when he thought she was doing something that might hurt her, and she had learned what it was like to have a father who would read bedtime stories or give and receive hugs without making her feel like she was being granted an unreasonable favour. A father who didn’t come home late and expect her to be quiet as a mouse as soon as he’d come in the door. They did alright. They adjusted to one another. And there’d been Sam’s sister Judy and her two kids, Nick and Amy who were near enough her age that they came to treat her as an almost-sibling until time and puberty and, later, wildly differing interests and careers drove them apart. 

She’d hardly ever pestered Sam for information about her birth family, because the way his face froze, they way he frowned and slumped when she did ask made her heart hurt. The comfort of their little jumble of a family had always seemed fragile to her, precious and easily disturbed. She had never wanted to look and pry and crack it open. She’d never wanted to think about the ways in which she and her dad didn’t belong to each other but only about the ways in which they did. It kept her from feeling so alone.

It wasn’t until Red showed up in her life that she had begun to remember, that she had begun to wonder, a curiosity like a winding spring or a persistent itch that couldn’t be alleviated or ignored, until it wasn’t mere curiosity but an obsession. She had needed to know, and she had needed Red to tell her, not Sam. Sam was her dad and Sam loved her, but she knew he lied to her when he thought she needed protecting, when he thought she didn’t really need to know. If she asked her dad he would go still and look pained and they would both spend weeks remembering that she was still just a changeling child, and he would worry that he hadn’t been enough family for her and she would worry that she was raising a specter of something that didn’t even matter, because Sam had been the one to raise her after all. And after the cancer, the first time, when it had almost dragged him under and he had sent her back home to focus on her work, and her graduate degree -- she had only seen him a couple times during the worst of it, looking so frail and paper thin that it had frightened her and he had told her he didn’t want her remembering him this way if the cancer got him -- she hadn’t wanted to make him look pained any more than she had to.

Now she knew though. Now she knew she wasn’t Sam’s, and more than that, knew who she belonged to instead. She was the daughter of a strong, trapped, desperate woman -- who had perhaps been just as gullible as she’d been -- and a power-hungry mad man, a murderer. 

It amazed her how much she wasn’t surprised, how much the sense of this made. The correctness of it settled easily but not comfortably into her, fitting with the mangled shapes her mind had always made. No wonder she had always been interested in the criminal mind, and the things that led a person to act on selfishness over conscience. No wonder she had chosen a man like Tom, it was only history repeating itself. And no wonder she had fallen in so easily, so instinctively with Red, even back when she had thought he meant to bring her chaos and harm, meant to use her as a pawn, rather than understanding that in his outrageous, reckless way he had only meant to protect her. She was made all up with parts that were strange and wild, and she drew destruction in her wake and that had always been true. And now, it seemed, she knew why.

**

By the time she got back up to the apartment she was hardly aware of her surroundings. She was shaking, not externally but inside, in her flesh, in her ribcage, in the muscles in her legs, as she tried to adjust or accommodate or find any familiar thing to hang on to. She was clumsy as she walked in, stumbling over her feet a little, even in her flat, sensible boots. She peeled off her coat and unwound her scarf -- Red’s scarf still, she had worn it into the blacksite and no one had even noticed but it had been smooth and warm and had smelled of his cologne and she had kept it bunched up in her hands beneath the table as Darrow had questioned her -- with awkward, numb feeling hands.

Red was up and about by then, she saw him in the kitchen as she walked by and she froze, just looking at him. He looked bleary, loose limbed and shuffling like he’d just woken up, bare feet silent on the floor, his white shirt and dark slacks, still the ones from yesterday she realized, looked softened and rumpled. He was sleepwalking his way through making coffee with the french press, the carton of milk already out and waiting on the counter, gathering condensation. 

Just a man on his morning routine, she thought, as he reached up and rubbed his palm against the shorn hair atop his head, though it wasn’t morning anymore, the short winter day already fading to a slow blue and black through the dining room windows. He looked pale and slouching and human and somehow that struck a note of fear in her. He had changed everything in her life, he’d come in and pulled it apart, just last night he’d reached into the darkest recesses of her carapace and brought out her most vulnerable, unknown parts and made her look at them, but he could do that because he was a force of nature, he was a mastermind, his reach and influence was more than mortal so it was no wonder he could tear her open and make her bleed. 

But he was just a man, and she still torn open, turned inside out, while here he was puttering in the kitchen.

She threw the coat and scarf onto the dining table and he turned to look at her with the noise, almost seeming surprised to see her.

“Good morning, Lizzy,” he said, bland and casual as though it were any easy afternoon, “I’m just making coffee if you’d like some. How did it go with Harold’s interrogation squad? I trust you fended them off with your accustomed bracing frankness?”

The aimless frustration in her sparked and snapped and focused, looking at Red’s amiable face that seemed to her at that moment purposefully indifferent, insensible of her despair. She found herself staring him down, her body taught as though she making ready for attack.

“Why did you come here, Red?” she demanded, her voice sounding all wrong, high and harsh. She felt like she couldn’t breathe.

“Lizzy? I don’t know…” he began and shook his head slightly, clearly lost.

“I don’t mean here here,” she broke in, gesturing dismissively, her mind spinning almost too fast for her to track the words falling out of her mouth, her heart beating so hard and fast that she felt sick, “I mean my life here -- why did you come into my life and make this mess of everything? Why not just leave me alone? Why not just leave me ignorant and happy?”

“I thought you said you were glad to be free of Tom,” he said slowly, his voice soft but she could hear the confusion, the tension in it, and it only made her more furious, more desperate, even though she didn’t really understand why.

“I was -- I am, now that I know what he is, but why did I have to know?” she said wildly, almost a wail and she gestured expansively with trembling hands, “Why did I have to know all of this? I could have just gone on thinking that Sam was the only father that really mattered and that Tom was just some sweet, ordinary guy and that I had finally made it to my normal life and I _never would have had to know_ that I’d followed in my mother’s footsteps and married a _murderer_.” 

Red was approaching her slowly, frowning and looking pained, his hands outstretched as though gentling a wild animal. But she would not be gentled. She backed up until she ran into the back of one of the dining chairs and planted her feet, and he didn’t advance farther, letting her keep her distance. Her chest hurt and her throat was tight with something like panic, she could feel tears in the corners of her eyes.

“He could have hurt you, Lizzy,” he said, sounding tired and sad and sorry, but his voice was full of steel and righteous assurance, “He would have done something drastic if I hadn’t come. Berlin wanted to get my attention.”

She understood what ‘drastic’ meant, easily, and she found herself thinking about what that life would have been like, blithely carrying on until the jaws of the trap closed around her. It would have hurt at the end, she thought, but then it would have stopped, all of it would have stopped, and she wouldn’t have had to go on and on. Walking around pried open and gutted, feeling like she’d lost Sam all over again, lost herself, lost everything she’d ever known or hoped for. What right did Red have to do that to her?

“Well, maybe that would have been better,” she said, her voice a thin, sickly parody of calm, and she knew as she heard it that she’d only said it to make him hurt, because she hurt, she was in freefall and stinging with it. She saw her words make their mark, she saw him flinch, saw his face take on a horrified slackness. So she continued unable to stop herself, “What good is knowing doing me? What good did it do my mother?,” she broke off with a strangled little sob and took a fluttering breath but it didn’t steady her, “Maybe he would have killed me, but at least I wouldn’t have felt like this for very long.”

Red rushed forward at that, gripping her arms, hard, as though he were going to shake her but he didn’t, just leaned in and tried to catch her gaze. Her attention was shattered though, by the rapid bird pounding of her heart, the tears in her eyes, the way she couldn’t stand to look at him with his face so full of pain and worry.

“You don’t mean that, Lizzy, _I know you don’t mean that,_ ” he insisted, he begged, she realized he was desperate for her agree, his voice low and sharp.

He needed her to tell him it was alright, that she would rather live, she could feel it in the way his fingers dug into the flesh of her arms and the way his eyes searched her face. She almost dug her heels in, insisted that he had harmed her more than anything, that she would rather be unknowing and dead -- because that would break him open, too, and she needed to break something, she did, or she would be the one in pieces. 

But the thought of _them broken_ , the thought of Red retreating from her, of having never seen his face or heard his voice or known his care made her collapse in on herself, dissolve, crying and incoherent, shaking her head and trying to disavow what she’d just said when she couldn’t force words through her numbed and traitorous mouth. She shifted in his grasp, that had relaxed slightly in the face of her tears, wrapping her arms around herself defensively. 

“What am I supposed to do with this?” she said as she fought to breath, “I almost told Meera today just because it feels too big to fit in my head. I buried Sam three months ago and I-- it’s almost like he never was at all, like you’ve taken him all over again and there’s all these things I should have asked him and… My father is a murderer, Red, he killed my mother and he… _What am I supposed to do with this?_ ”

He stepped forward and and gathered her up, his hands sliding around her back in what started as soothing patterns but turned to pressing her in place, as though she might float off if he let his grip slacken. She let herself rest against him, heavy and trembling, tucked into the crook of his neck the way she had been once before.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured into her hair, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you, I’m sorry. It was unfair to make you deal with this now, on top of everything else.”

“So why did you?” she asked, unfolding her arms to wrap them around him instead, her one solid thing.

“You asked me,” he said simply, sadly.

It was different, feeling him speak as well as hearing, she thought. Her tears had stopped but she couldn’t get her breathing under control, as though she’d just run miles and miles. She pulled back just enough to look at his face. “But I’ve asked you dozens of times before. What made last night different?”

“I’m a selfish man, Lizzy, and I always will be,” he said, his tone apologetic, pained. He was running his fingers slowly through her hair, smoothing it back from her hot face and she found she was slowly relaxing under his touch. It was hypnotic. “Last night was different because you trusted me. You hadn’t asked me since you’d begun to do that,” he continued, “And I didn’t want you to stop. I didn’t want you to be angry with me again.”

The irony of that struck her and she found herself smiling wryly, a tiny, shaky smile with frayed edges. “Just look how well that turned out for you,” she mumbled with the tenuous, waterlogged humour that follows tears.

He acknowledged that with a nod, gently withdrawing his fingers from her hair. She shivered at the sensation and shuffled closer, as close as she could be.

“Do you really regret knowing all this?” he asked, and she could tell it was a serious question, not just coaxing.

“Yes. No. I don’t know,” she said and closed her eyes rather than meet his concerned gaze, “I just feel like I’ve lost everything, all at once. I don’t know what to do.”

He hummed an acknowledgment and for a long time they said nothing, just breathed, just clung. He swayed her gently, almost like dancing, soothing. She realized he was keeping his breath slow and even, helping her find a less frantic rhythm to settle into.

“Maybe you don’t have to do anything, for the moment,” he suggested at length, quietly, mostly into her hair, “Maybe you could let yourself just be for a little while.”

She was distracted for a moment by his hands stroking against her back, light but sure, and she clutched at the soft material of his shirt in return, fingertips catching against his back. She thought suddenly of the dream she’d had the night before and half-forgotten. The dream where Red had towed her along, trying to lead her out of danger but all she had wanted was to find some small, warm, safe place just for them, where she could encourage his hands onto her skin, his body against hers. She tried to ignore how the burning panic in her had turned on its head, transformed into a different kind of heat, something sharp and hollow that made her restless, that rung in her, made her ears buzz faintly. She leaned forward and pressed her cheek to his and tried to take a calming breath.

“Lizzy?” he asked, hardly sound, almost just a sensation against her ear. She shivered, felt her breath catch.

“This is nice,” she said, lips near enough his jaw that it was almost a kiss -- she felt him clutch at her slightly at her words, could feel how fast his heart was beating, “Maybe we could do this sometimes without the hysterics first.”

He huffed a little laugh and stilled his hands. “Have a little mercy on a tired, old man, Lizzy, I can’t seem to keep up with you today,” he said, somewhere between longing and bewildered, “You keep changing directions.”

“Not old,” she protested without thought, shifting against him, feeling needy and pliable. Her skin was burning with wanting and embarrassment. She felt out of control, but this at least was a kind of freefall that was expected if not welcomed. She’d known she was walking along this precipice for a while now, that they were -- and he must have known, as well. How could he not? He was perceptive and worldly and had always seen right through her. And encouraged her, she thought, his attention had always held that extra charge, that element of hope and expectancy.

“Maybe not old,” he agreed, “But definitely tired. And definitely worried about catching up, my dear -- and getting caught up.”

He started to pull away, step back, leaving her to shore herself up and stand all on her own weak legs, but he didn’t let go over her, not quite. They stared each other down for a long, long moment, afraid and longing. Then very carefully, deliberately, she lifted her face expectantly, he leaned in and kissed her flushed cheek -- once, twice, the second just missing the corner of her mouth. Then he was gone from her as she was trying to memorize the sensation, stepped out of reach. 

She sighed but she did understand. Better not to begin like this, in desperation and despair, and always afterward wonder if it had only been because she had no other solid ground, because he was her last resort. She didn’t think it was so, but just for the time being, there wasn’t anything that she knew to be true, not for certain. And she had to be certain, or they would neither of them survive. 

_‘You trusted me and I didn’t want you to stop,’_ he’d said, _‘I didn’t want you to be angry with me,’_ like it was the simplest, most elemental thing to him, like her approval was the most essential thing. It was staggering. She watched as he walked back into the kitchen and finished making the coffee, glancing back at her, checking on her from time to time, the tension that still buoyed up his frame. Yes, she was the one who had to be certain.

“Come on and let me make you breakfast, Lizzy,” he called to her, catching her attention, “And you can tell me how it went at the blacksite.”

“It’s four in the afternoon,” she protested, more for something to say. She followed him into the kitchen and leaned against the counter a safe distance away. She was too shaky and wrung out for anything like an appetite, but it had been an awfully long time since she’d eaten anything, long enough the thought of eating made her feel suddenly faint. She slid herself up to sit on the hard, cold marble countertop rather than risk her legs dropping her to the floor.

“Yes, but as neither of us has eaten yet today, it is still technically breaking one’s fast.” He handed her a mug of hot, milky, sweet coffee, his hands briefly cupping hers around it, and brushed by her to peer into the enormous, tidy fridge. 

“Tell me,” he said, trying for a lighter tone, “What are your feelings about eggs?”

**


	12. when I've seen through the horror

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liz makes a hard choice and an impulsive move.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: Well, kids, it's been a bumpy road in this fandom recently, but I'm holding steady. I'm not giving in and I'm not giving up. As for the chapter, it's the longest I've ever posted as one piece but I felt it was important to keep it whole, and there's something really big that happens so I think you'll want to keep going. If you're a John Crowley fan you will recognize a reference in this one. It seemed apt.

Tell me again  
When the day has been ransomed  
And the night has no right to begin  
Try me again  
When the angels are panting  
And scratching at the door to come in  
Tell me again  
When I’m clean and I’m sober  
Tell me again  
When I’ve seen through the horror  
Tell me again  
Tell me over and over  
Tell me that you need me then

\-- Amen, Leonard Cohen

**

The drive out to the house where they meant to spend the holiday was a long one, but Red said he didn’t like to take the plane unless he was traveling for business as it involved so many extra people. This wasn’t business, this was more of an escape, a retreat. 

She was tired and thunderstruck and curious to see what he had planned, so she’d agreed and let him handle all the arrangements without enquiring further. It didn’t matter where specifically, they were going and that was enough. 

It must have been a surprise to him that she was suddenly willing to go along so easily, but perhaps he understood that it was a docility born of exhaustion, not some radical aberration in her character. He didn’t question her about it. She had carried herself through the great trial of losing her father and then having to endure Tom Keen and she had come to a stop, not quite on the other side but out of energy to continue to direct herself. 

And as antithetical as it might have seemed to her even a few months before, she trusted him above any other in her life. It had grown, recently the surety of that trust in him had unfurled, it was no longer made of simple necessity, when she’d had no where else to turn but him and she’d had to trust him or go mad. That provisional understanding between them had held. 

He’d supported her, protected her, had offered her the horrifying tale of her beginning and his even though it had wounded them both -- and before that, in the midst of the Garrick incursion, that in some ways had started it all, he traded his life for hers, had done everything in his power to see her free and unharmed. 

She didn’t like to think about that day, not anymore. She had coped, she had triumphed in the end, but, later, she had come to see how close she had been to losing him entirely. It wasn’t the close call with Garrick, she knew enough of his sordid tale to know that death might creep up near enough to grab hold of him but he always slipped free, somehow or other. 

It was his disappearance afterward that alarmed her. If she hadn’t called him in a panic about her traitor husband and asking for answers, for his guiding hand, would he have come back at all? And if he eventually had, would he have let her near so close, know him so well? Or would he have seen what a liability she could be to him, how easily she could be threatened to get to him, how easily she could trip him up by her clumsy attempts to force his hand and decide instead to keep her forever at arms length, forever in the dark? 

**

After her outburst, the day she gave her official statement at the blacksite, she had regained her composure but it was a spindly sort of calm, like a badly made chair that wobbled and creaked unless you held very still. 

Red had made her French toast from slices of a loaf of fresh bakery bread and he had proved himself a competent cook. He could crack eggs one handed, a trick she’d never mastered, and he had a knack for seasoning, and flipped the french toast with a neat flick of the spatula without any of them slithering away and jumping out of the skillet -- another skill she’d never developed. 

She had watched him from her silent perch on the counter. Then she had sat in the dining room and looked out at the evening and eaten very slowly until she was sure her body knew what to do with food before finding herself ravenous.

He had hovered. Somehow he had continued to hover even when he sat down across from her and ate his own meal. It was perhaps the longest stretch of quiet they’d ever let stand between them, that she could recall, and it might have been awkward if she hadn’t been so drained by manic anger and terrible desperation she’d felt. She was somehow both numbed and made raw, abraded by the depth of the feelings that had run through her. 

If she had been less tired, perhaps she would have felt self conscious about how the memory of her lips against his jaw stayed present in the forefront of her mind, but she didn’t, she wasn’t. She decided she would worry about that later. 

She told him in a rambling way all about her interrogation and what Cooper had told her, and Meera apologizing. It gave her something else to think about, and once she began to talk she hadn’t been able to stop until she got to the end of it. He’d commented abstractedly about unnecessary fuss and suspicion but she could tell he was truly bothered by the situation, the treatment she’d received.

She had needed to sleep then, after everything, a near catastrophic tiredness overtaking her and it was all she could do to get herself to her narrow white room with it’s high, plush bed. She wasn’t even sure what she mumbled to Red as she ambled away, but she remembered shutting her door and shedding all of her clothes with weary hands and feeling relieved she’d been too shaky that morning to bother with makeup so she could press her face right into the smooth white linen pillowcase. 

**

She didn’t so much sleep as loose time. Her exhaustion had stretched so far that it snapped, leaving her in the limp black of dreamlessness and senselessness. When she woke again it felt as though no time had passed, and also as though days or more had slipped by, or as though she’d woken in another dimension. For a time all she could do was sit in bed, wrapped in the comforter, staring around the room in sleep-blinded bewilderment, trying to decide what time it was, what day, what year. 

There was the tenderest opaline glow from beyond the curtain that might have been streetlights, or might have been dawn. Her wrist ached quietly as she sat, she had forgotten to take anything for it while being interrogated, while coming apart at the seams, while sleeping until her mind was still and quiet relieved fatigue. 

She dressed in soft, comfortable clothes, and the big wool cardigan that used to be her dad’s knowing she needed the tangible comfort of it, and ventured out of the safe cloister of her room. It was early, so early the day had hardly begun and only the dim hall light was on, leading her to believe she was the only one up. She supposed that was something of a relief. She realized she had left her dog with Dembe and never picked him up again, and hoped he wasn’t making a nuisance of himself with Red’s right hand man.

She took pills for her wrist. She drank water and ate a piece of toast. She stood in the kitchen listening to the quiet, feeling lost. That seemed to be extent of what she could accomplish at that early hour. 

There was no more Tom to avoid, no more fortress of boxes to take apart and put back together, Red was long returned from his sojourn. There was no case. It was too early to go collect Hudson. There was nothing to do and if there had been, she had no energy with which to do it. That endless propelling force that hadn’t let her rest for months and months had ceased as suddenly as if it had been turned off with a switch leaving her feeling as slow and aching with tiredness as with fever.

Settled in the living room, she passed time by pursuing the book Red had left on the coffee table the other night. It was a very strange book, purporting to be about the architecture of country houses but it seemed to have a rambling treatise on the nature of perception and reality wrapped a small amount of informational text. But she was too drowsy to make much sense of it. 

Soon she found herself dozing, curled up in the shallow embrace of the couch, with a line from the strange book stuck in her head, _the farther inside you go, the bigger it is, and when you have reached the center it is infinite_ and she wondered, while mostly asleep, if that’s what Red’s world was, invisible from the perspective she’d started from, but rushing at her larger and larger. And from his perspective, she supposed, it was everywhere without end. Was she willing to follow him down in, she wondered, mostly dreaming, seeing passages and secret hatches and winding stairs, and a sudden wide, wintery place, to where it was dangerous and vast. Or would he be willing to join here, where the world was small and personal and ordinary. 

Eventually she submerged far enough that her conscious mind no longer tracked and worried.

**

She was woken some time later when the room was bright with sunlight refracted and amplified through sheer white curtains by the sound of a door closing, not slamming but falling heavily shut. She swung her feet to the floor and began smoothing her hair and tugging at her cardigan, suddenly certain by a change in air pressure that it was Red back, though she hadn’t known he’d gone, and she didn’t want him to see her so disheveled. He’d seen her in all sorts of states, she realized, such vanity was pointless, and yet she pressed her hand to forehead and wished that she’d washed her face.

He came to look in on her, perhaps expecting her to still be sleeping, but he met her intent stare with a warm smile and she felt her face go hot. She fidgeted with the too long cuffs of her sweater. 

He was dressed casually, but he looked resplendent, assured and golden, rested and placid -- and abidingly fond, she realized, she could see it in the curve of his lips and the corners of his eyes and the smooth arches of his brows. She liked to see the calm set of his shoulders, the amiable lift of his proud chin, the way his eyes were bright and alive with looking at her. She felt the pull of him again, her thousand, million interior particles still turned in his direction. 

Yet in the face of all this, to her he was still just a man, not a mastermind, not a force of nature, but a person standing before her. Whereas the day before that had alarmed her, left her out in the storm without shelter, today it comforted her. Finally, they stood in the same place, on the same level, and met each other as equals.

He said two surprising things, one right after the other, perhaps hoping she wouldn’t overthink the second while preoccupied with the first.

Kaplan wanted to see her, he told her, “Just you,” he added, “I think you’re her new favourite you know, she wouldn’t even tell me what it was about,” and he told her he would give her the address. 

“I know the suite number,” she reminded him, “Unless it’s changed again?”

“Oh, she doesn’t actually live there,” he dismissed, as though letting her in on a joke, “The suites are just for business. It’s ingenious really, all sorts of things go on in hotels,” then, after a little pause, “Why don’t you come away with me for the holidays?”

“Was that asking me or telling me?” she said, vying for time, thinking, but you don’t like the holidays, and knowing immediately that it would be cruel of her to say it aloud.

“You don’t have to, of course, but there’s a place out by the coast, I go every year. It’s quiet there, peaceful. I thought you might like to join me.”

She heard what he wasn’t saying, of course. He went away there every year to hide, to wait out the most difficult days of the year away from the glittering joviality of the masses. Perhaps he thought she might need similar respite. And he hoped for her company. 

And she wanted his, she knew that instantly. More than that, she wanted to know all his traditions, all his little hideaways. That hadn’t changed since their first meeting, even if the context had, she still wanted to know everything. Every detail he was willing to share, and every detail he wasn’t, she was hungry to know it all, even those things which she couldn’t see without at first flinching. It was just that, now, she understood why.

She stood, so she could read his face from a better angle, and saw the hope, the tension in him and then her mouth felt too thick, her heart beat too fast to allow her to make too much of a reply. She nodded. “Okay, yeah,” she said, and her gaze slid away, not wanting to betray the depth of her feeling, “I’d like that.”

**

The address Red had given her turned out to be Kaplan’s actual home, or so she supposed, a narrow brownstone in a good, older neighborhood with a grass green door, and on the door a large brass knocker in the shape of a delicate hand holding a sphere. She didn’t have long to wait on the stoop before Kaplan opened the door and peered up at her approvingly from behind her thick glasses.

“Ah, Elizabeth, right on time, come in, come in,” she said ushering Liz and simultaneously pushing a very large, very long-haired beast of a grey striped cat back from the doorway with her foot, “Mustn’t let Frostbite there get out or god knows what he’ll get up to.”

“Frostbite?” she asked blankly as she slipped into the high, narrow foyer. She couldn’t quite compute the idea of fierce, formidable, crime scene cleaning, network running Kaplan as a cat lady, but then she’d never really pictured Kaplan as anything at all outside of her occupational capacity.

“Him with the fur,” Kaplan said, “Properly Hrimfaxi, but that’s a mouthful and he spent six months giving me the cold shoulder. I suppose you could say I inherited him. The former owner was a despicable human being in all but his devotion to that animal, and it was a cruelty beyond me to leave him at a shelter after years of pampering. We adjusted to one another eventually.”

Kaplan directed her to a plush, dark painted sitting room crowded with furniture and bookcases that focused around a large, edwardian fireplace rather than a television the way so many sitting rooms did. The airy curtains were drawn firmly shut, maintaining privacy from the street. The townhouse seemed to be made in victorian style with long, narrow rooms and soaring high ceilings. Liz, having grown up in cozy midwestern homes and cheaply built schools, always felt too exposed with such a lot of open air above her until she adjusted to the space. The enormous grey and black cat followed them, and stared at her with big, flat green eyes as though judging her from down it’s long straight nose. 

Everything about Kaplan’s home seemed to be of well used, shabby opulence and vague menace. The walls were dark and enveloping, the bookcases massive and looming in true Jacobean style with winking, diamond paned glass fronts and heavy-browed with elaborate crown molding. The hearth beneath the wide mantlepiece was tiled in beetle wing mottled green and gold, dimly iridescent and made moreso by the little fire that burned merrily its small iron grate. The bright, cutting winter sun didn’t seem to venture far from the high, muffled windows.

Liz settled on the green silk couch, that rustled as she sat with a little slick, feathery sound and stared around her. If forced to specify, this dim, cozy strangeness is not what she would have pictured for Kaplan’s home. She had supposed the creamy, impersonal grandeur of hotel suites, or perhaps something cunningly modern and sleek. She wasn’t sure what to make of it.

Kaplan brought in a large tea tray laid with a simple black glass service, and when she set it down on the low table Liz saw that there was a thick folder under one of the cups.

“That’s for you, Dearie,” she said, nodding towards the folder, and then offered Liz a choice of milk, lemon or whiskey for her tea with a wry quirk of her lips.

“Milk, please,” she answered, and then, “Why do people keep offering me drinks?” she complained drily, lifting the cup to retrieve the file, “Do I really look that miserable?”

Kaplan pinned her with a look as if to say ‘yes you really do, dear, there’s no fooling me,’ and settled into what appeared to be her customary chair, given the number of books and papers stacked up beside it. “I wanted to contact you first,” said Kaplan, “Given it’s much more your project than Raymond’s. I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but this morning we lost track of the man we know as Tom Keen.”

Her thoughts stalled over that in confusion, not surprised they’d lost him, nothing about Tom’s slithering and slippery ways surprised her any longer, but that he hadn’t been truly vanished the moment he walked out the back door of their house. She hadn’t realized. She wondered if Red had known, and knew instantly that he had, she thought of him and Dembe conferring in the hall that first night, and wondered why he’d chosen to keep her in the dark. She felt herself nursing a spark of irritation with him yet again.

“How did he slip away?,” she asked, a new fear growing. She took a sip of hot, fragrant tea to think through how to frame it, “He didn’t, no one was hurt, right? He said -- that day, he said he’d noticed the tail. He didn’t --” she shook her head and set her cup back down with a clank in it’s saucer.

“No, no. Everyone’s fine. He simply entered a little junk shop and vanished. By the time his tail deemed it safe to follow him in, he was nowhere to be found, and we are certain he didn’t retrace his steps. There must have been a back way. I believe he must have another little bolt hole somewhere besides the one we documented, as he hasn’t surfaced since. That file is the last surveillance report,” said Kaplan and let her absorb that for a time.

Liz set aside the file, not interested in looking at photographs of Tom slinking around town. She could still picture him far too easily, both of him -- the sweet, adoring man who’d seemed to fall quickly and vibrantly in love with her, who had promised her love and family, and the cold-eyed menace she’d tracked, who had attacked her in their kitchen, who had manipulated and confused her for three years -- superimposed together in her minds eye, side by side. They were dissimilar in all but their features, yet both of them were too familiar to her, never far from her thoughts.

“What about the junk shop?” she asked instead, “If he had some sort of passage out he must have connections there.”

“We’re looking into it,” promised Kaplan, “I’m sure I will have lots more to tell you soon. But I wanted you to be aware as soon as possible that our man is now unaccounted for. I believe you are safe, Elizabeth, not to worry, if he hasn’t made a move by now I’m satisfied his focus has shifted. But, still…”

“Yes. I understand. Thank you,” she said, feeling genuinely grateful. Kaplan had been such incredible support to her these last weeks, in her sharp, peculiar, all seeing way. 

She wasn’t sure she would have survived Tom nearly so long without the woman’s vast, hidden network to draw on. And Kaplan wasn’t Red, wasn’t of his organization, she realized, Kaplan was her own entity and her own force and therefore a neutral party in the contest of wills between herself and Red. She never could have leaned so on Red’s resources without feeling the sting of it, without feeling the bite of thinking she would have to be grateful to him, and that would only add to the horrible complication of them.

“You’re staying with Raymond now, I think?” asked Kaplan as though understanding the direction of her thoughts, watching her with a look so remote that it was sly.

“Yes,” she said, more acknowledgment than affirmation, unaccountably nervous as though she were making an admission, “For a bit, I guess. Just until things are sorted out with the house.”

“And how is he treating you? I always assumed he’d be a bit much in close quarters, for any length of time,” Kaplan asked, frowning a little in real concern.

“He’s been… fine actually,” she answered, feeling herself flustered. She didn’t want to leap to Red’s defence, still not really sure he deserved it sometimes, but he’d been so patient and giving with her recently -- far moreso she realized than Tom had ever been, when on his best behavior. Or Josh for that matter, or Malcolm. 

“He’s being a very good host,” she came up with at last, but knew that wasn’t it at all, it wasn’t manners he showed her, it was something much more personal and abundant and vital.

“The scene teams have all withdrawn,” Kaplan told her, and there was that remote slyness, again, “I’m sure if you forced the issue your A. D. Cooper would let you have use of it once more.”

“Oh?” she said, careful, surprised by how much she did not want to return there, and how much she also did not want to leave Red’s auspices. 

“Of course it may not be best to stay where Keen can so easily find you,” Kaplan continued and she couldn’t tell if she was teasing or voicing a serious concern.

“Right. Yes,” she agreed, perhaps too easily and relaxed slightly. She didn’t feel like volunteering that Red had asked her to come away with him, unsure of how to frame it as anything other than exactly what it was, and not really sure why she wanted to. If anyone was likely to understand, it was Kaplan, she supposed. And yet. “I was surprised to find out you didn’t actually live at the hotel,” she said instead.

“Not all of us live the nomadic life Raymond has chosen, you know. Hotels are a useful place to base a network. Anonymity can be bought there, and it is nothing unusual to see people coming and going with parcels and cases. But to live there? In that impersonal, impermanent way with all of those people fussing and cleaning? No, it wouldn’t suit me at all.”

Liz sat with the cup and saucer cradled in her lap, her fingers tracing the pattern tracing the pattern etched into the opaque glass of the cup. It was a home here, she realized, and that perhaps the sense of menace that she’d felt. Nothing threatening after all, but a kind of solidity, and permanence, a gathering around of favoured possessions that had settled in for long years with their owner presiding, all the trappings of a life lived intentionally, and cherished. 

Kaplan lived out of the world, she lived just as much in the shadows as Red, and yet she had a home and a self, and a cat. Liz looked across at her, her petite frame dwarfed by the brown velvet wingback chair with the warn arms and yet still regal and unquestionable by dint of her will, her poise, her focus. 

Perhaps even out here in the dark, Liz might someday also learn to live with intention and focus, and not always feel the earth shifting under her as she did now. Perhaps stultifying normalcy or weary, defensive roving were not her only options, perhaps there was something else, somewhere in between.

**

She took Hudson out to the dog park that afternoon, knowing he needed real exercise and that she needed some distance from the heavy, churning of her thoughts. She threw a tennis ball for her dog until her wrist was sore again and walked him round and round until they were both tired. It was bright and clear, but terribly cold, and she was soon frozen all the way through, though Hudson seemed unaffected, but her mind was quieted for a time by the motion and the sharp breeze on her face.

Then she sat on an empty bench, and Hudson sat in front of her, facing her, as though he knew she had important things to tell him.

“We’ve talked about this,” she said, her voice already wobbly, “I know we have. And I know you hate moving and being cooped up alone all day.”

She cleared her throat and scratched his ears and stroked them. “It’s just for a little while, until things settle down. And you like Marla, remember Marla? And Toby?” He tilted his head at that and gave a little excited yip. “Let’s go see Marla, okay? Let’s go see Marla.”

Marla Roser was the music teacher at Tom’s school, and the middle school it fed into. She really was a music teacher, she’d had Kaplan and Aram run her background, which made her feel an obscure kind of embarrassment for her intrusiveness, but she’d had to be sure. She’d met Marla at the handful of school functions Tom had successfully dragged her to and they had hit it off, as had Hudson and her energetic but well behaved blue heeler mix, Toby. They used to have doggy play dates and coffee together once a month until Liz got so busy that she had, in essence, dropped all her former friendships.

It had been awkward to reconnect with her after all that time, and even more awkward to have to tell her such a jumble of half-truths, but she’d done it, for Hudson’s sake. He needed his routines or he was nervous, and grouchy and off his food. He needed attention and stability and safety, and for at least a little while, she knew she couldn’t give him that. 

She’d wanted to get him safely out while she was still locked in her charade with Tom, irrationally frightened that Tom would do something -- she had heard a story on the news once of a woman whose husband had hurt her cat in retaliation for some argument so the wife had in turn shot the husband, and that story had stuck with her. But hiding her dog would have made Tom would have made him suspicious, and selfishly, she had needed the comfort of Hudson’s company in that tension-filled house. 

Now though, she knew that he was better off staying for a time with Marla and Toby, having company and regular exercise, until she had a new home base to which she could bring him, even if it gave her an awful sinking feeling. She didn’t want Hudson to think she was abandoning him, and she didn’t want to do without him, but pawning him off on Dembe and dragging him around after her, confusing and upsetting him wasn’t right either. 

So she’d called Marla and put into motion the arrangements she’d made when she realized that her life was about to fall apart. She went to Marla’s at the appointed time, and hoisted the big carry-all of Hudson’s things onto her shoulder, and put Hudson on his leash and waited at the door, trying to feel hopeful, trying to feel altruistic, trying not to feel like she was giving away her child.

Marla hugged her when she opened the door, and Liz wasn’t used to friendly affection anymore, had to fight not to flinch. And then When Marla had moved on to greeting Hudson, she wished that she could try it over again, because she missed having friends that hugged her, not that there had been many to begin with. 

Marla was tall, round faced and warm. She was several years older than Liz, but so kind and energetic and uncynical that she often felt that Marla was the younger one. She had liked spending time with her, and regretted that their friendship would likely never be truly rekindled, not with what her life had become.

They watched over Toby and Hudson playing and getting reaquainted. Marla very carefully asked her how things were going with Tom, how she was holding up, and Liz gave her the shortest approximation of an honesty summary she could manage. She felt almost alarmed by the friendly concern, no longer used to trying to talking about her life to people beyond her microcosm. She turned down offers of coffee and food, feeling her eyes already stinging and not wanting to make a scene. 

She knelt down and threw her arms around Hudson’s shoulders and snuffled a bit into his fur. “Be good, baby,” she whispered, “I’ll be back, I swear I’ll be back.”

She thanked Marla again and then she fled. Back in her car she sat with Hudson’s furry towel on her lap and sobbed, in a way she hadn’t over the death of her marriage, or any ot the myriad hurts dealt her recently -- and yet for all of them at once. It took her along time to surface, and her head ached, and she was so, so tired of crying that she hoped she never would again. But she felt clearer, after, lighter. 

She knew Hudson was safe and looked after, and that she would be back for him as soon as she was able. She knew that this wretched holiday season would pass, and though she still couldn’t picture it, her life would take some kind of shape. She wouldn’t simply wink out of existence like an extinguished candle, defeated by her own uncertainty. She knew she would let herself be pulled along by Red for a time, and that she was ready face whatever it was that had, and was still growing between them.

**

When she had first seen Red, chained and caged as he had been though allowed his own, perfectly tailored clothes, she hadn’t thought much of his looks. Or if she had, it was only in the most abstract sense. She had been impressed, certainly, by the power of him, the force, the way the air seemed more bright and alive and crisp around him. She had been nervous in a way she hadn’t been in years, not fearing the violence he might threaten, if he was indeed a violent man, but because of the humming nervous force of the means used to contain him, the urgency and fear with which they all acted. It was the way he seemed to genially tolerate the indignity of his incarceration, as though it was a simple inconvenience soon overwith, as though the situation didn’t really apply to him. And it hadn’t, in the end. 

In the midst of all that, her assessment of Raymond Reddington the man was cursory at best. And what she saw didn’t initially impress her -- though later she wouldn’t understand how that could be. Height only middling, older, though it was hard to say with certainty how old, for though his short buzzed hair was receding, and there was silver in among the gold and brown, his skin was smooth and firm like a young man’s. From there her perception skewed, impressed by the weight of him, not his person but his presence, which made him a gravitational force. His eyes were bright, sharp, all-seeing, his mouth bearing the peaceable, self-satisfied smile of a man who knows a great many secrets that the rest of the world does not, and the air of a man who contained within him something greater than himself, an awareness, a consciousness, a power and facility to perceive and effect. 

And then he opened his mouth, and spoke to her in his low, murmuring way as though to hypnotize and entice. It drew her in and put her on edge. she would spend months in this state, frantic with wanting to hear and understand him and yet wanting to flee, wanting pierce and rend at his smooth persona and wanting to let it wash over her and bear her away.

Even when she had feared and hated him, she was absorbed by him, by watching his movements, his fleeting expressions, the wide careless gestures of his hands and the small, instinctive ones. She watched him parade his various personas before different enemies and friends, she watched the small habitual movements of his mouth as he thought and considered.

**

When she came back to the apartment, she was surprised to find him immersed in work down in the workshop. He sat in the small circle of gold from the work lamp, peering through the magnifying lense at the minute workings he cradled and manipulated in his hands. His face was shadowed but his hands and forearms seemed to glow under the small light, and he was intent enough he didn’t look up at her entry. She reset the alarm, more motivated than ever to be on her guard, knowing with a certainty that Tom was in the wind, and stood looking down at him for a time. She couldn’t tell what he was making, but it seemed to involve gears and screws and cylinders and other small components he held up and fitted in.

It was warm in the workshop, and dry and dark and quiet -- peaceful, she thought, not exactly orderly but definitely peaceful. 

“What are you making?” she asked, mostly joking, “It’s not dangerous is it, should I be concerned?”

“Just a little project to keep my hands busy,” he said and looked up with the sharp kind of smile that told her that he did, in fact, have something up his sleeve, “What did our Kaplan have to tell you?”

“Tom’s gone, he lost his tail this morning. Something what was a surprise to me because I thought he was gone already. Why didn’t you tell me you still had tabs on him?”

“You were going to be interrogated and vetted,” he told her, calm and unapologetic, “If you knew you would either have to tell your… colleagues, or you would have to lie to them, and neither were appealing options. Lying would put you in an untenable position and putting the FBI on the hunt seemed like the best way to send Tom and Berlin firmly underground for the duration.”

She couldn’t think of a retort to that, knowing his logic was unassailable, yet feeling she had somehow been cheated. She poked at some of the bits spread over the scarred, massive worktable, holding them up and examining them.

“Seriously, what is this?” she asked again, holding up some kind of spindle.

But he wouldn’t answer, instead he narrated the charms of the country place he wanted to spend the holiday, a sort of wall of words that neither of them seemed to pay much attention to. She settled in on the high, creaking-cushioned stool before the drafting table across the room from him and swiveled until she could see him clearly. 

“I already agreed to go with you, Red,” she reminded him.

She sat and watched him work at whatever it was for a long time, curled over her knees, her heels braced against the edge of the seat, all self contained. Both of them in silence, neither in each other’s space directly, yet the company soothed her, and the cave-like dimness made her feel sheltered, out of the way. She didn’t even take out her phone to occupy herself, she just sat and was still.

Eventually she was able to speak, to tell him about Hudson staying with a friend for a while and hurried on to explain her reasoning, and to reassure him she wasn’t going to be keeping him and Dembe busy with her dog. He stopped his work and looked at her with such a look, equal parts sympathy and skepticism.

“What?” she demanded, “I’m doing the right thing, you can’t judge me for this.”

He seemed to chew over what it was he wanted to say, still all sympathy that set her teeth on edge.

“I’m worried that you’re punishing yourself,” he came out with eventually, “I can’t deny it may be healthier for the dog, but I wonder if that’s why you’ve done it -- if maybe you want to send away all your familiar comforts because you feel… that that’s what should happen to you, that’s what you deserve.”

“That’s not what I _deserve,_ ” she snapped, “I don’t think that.” But in the second afterwards she was no longer sure it was true.

“Good. Because if you did think that,” he told her, very firm, “You would be wrong.”

He stood and wiped his hands on a rag and rolled down his shirtsleeves. Then he walked up to her and took her hand to help her uncurl from her perch. She stumbled slightly at the sudden alteration in her circulation after being so folded up, and he steadied her, still with that worried frown.

“I’ve looked after myself for a long time, Red,” she told him, wanting to reassure, wanting him to understand, “I've learned how to do it without tearing myself to bits.”

“Hmm, have you?” he said, releasing her, “You’ll have to teach me how then.”

**

Dembe joined them for dinner, which was a relief for things felt fraught somehow between her and Red again. Not in the way it had been, but there was a heaviness in the air, an over-awareness. But with the three of them it was a nice meal and good company though subdued. She was happy to stay in, certainly. She’d grabbed a quick sandwich and coffee before the dog park, and the thronging crowds laden with bags and the pervasiveness of christmas lights and christmas carols were hard to take. 

He retreated again soon after though, leaving her and Red alone once more with most of a bottle of wine to split between them if they felt like it. They were leaving the next morning, early, so a late night was out of the question, but even the lingering exhaustion that plagued her after more than two months of barely sleeping, she knew she would lie awake for hours with this tension hanging in the air.

She caught Red gaze as she returned from taking her plate to the kitchen and it felt like they were staring each other down. She took up her glass.

She started in on a line about the very strange book he’d been reading, desperate for some distraction and he took up the discussion readily. It seemed that the man whose apartment they were staying in was a descendant of the author and his wife, and what interested Red was not the arcane philosophy of it but the folie a deux. 

“This woman, Violet, was John Drinkwater’s child bride, and she believed absolutely that she could travel between worlds and treat with faeries, that her life was only a part of a strange, slowly unfolding Tale. Drinkwater fell in love with her and believed without question -- as people were more apt to do around the turn of the century, I suppose. He built her a remarkably large and strange house as an engagement gift. Between the two of them they spun a whole reality, and lived in it with their many children all their lives, untouched by modern ideas of science and relativity,” he shook his head and finished his wine, “To love someone so much that you can share in their madness without question, see all the things they see and never doubt them. Well… it’s a fairy tale isn’t it? I was fascinated from the moment Isaac told me the story.”

 _He’s so lonely,_ she thought, He’s so very lonely, and nodded, and both of them sat envying a long-dead mad woman and her incredible good luck.

**

It happened as he bid her goodnight as they parted ways in the hall. Instead of ducking into her room as she had meant to, she reach out and halted him with a hand on his arm. His flesh was warm and firm under his sleeve and Red turned back, face an obvious question. She didn’t speak, blamed the wine for the way her body acted outside of her command though in truth a glass and a half did little damage. She reached up, winding her arms about his shoulders, solid under her hands -- and it was as easy and comfortable as if she did it every day though her heart beat in her throat and her skin prickled hot -- and pressed her mouth to his. 

As kisses went it was haphazard and clumsy, too hastily begun, she almost retreated in embarrassment, but then he responded. With a gasp against her mouth and his fingers digging into her sides, he was kissing her back and she could hardly breath for the joy of it -- the relief. Yes, this was it, this is what she’d felt barreling towards them all along.

He was careful at first, with conscious finesse, his fingers clenching and unclenching at her ribs. But she bit at his lips and pulled him closer, unwilling to stand even inches of distance, and he seemed to melt under her hands, giving up finesse in favour of desperation. 

Nothing was enough, not his mouth against hers or his hands in her hair or clutching and shifting against him, his scent, his taste. She was bright and alight and heavy with wanting, and he was pressing her against the wall and dragging his lips against the skin of her neck, his teeth against her pulse, drawing a shiver out of her -- she heard herself draw a gasp and make a strained noise that sounded too much like _please._

He stopped then suddenly, all at once. His hands pressed her shoulders to the wall but he was drawing back despite how she clutched at him to keep him close. He was flushed and his lips were swollen, eyes dark, intent -- all she could read in him was hunger, _yearning_ , like she was offering him something so precious he couldn’t even believe. She felt herself thrill in anticipation, dizzy and single-minded and unashamed in how much she wanted his weight against her, his heat, his deliberate, desperate hands. She blinked up at him, smiling slowly.

“Red,” she murmured, low and confident, reaching up to press a kiss on his chin the way she’d just realized she’d always wanted to, “Come to bed with me.”

But he only pulled farther away. She couldn’t read his face, could only tell that it had gone still like he was trying to close himself to her. She felt near to tears of frustration that he would retreat right when she had just realized that this was vitally important, that her body spoke to his and that was what she needed, what they needed -- because she needed him in ways she couldn’t even quantify but words didn’t always serve them well.

“Lizzy,” he said, hoarse, in something like a warning tone, “You’ve been through so much recently, _we’ve_ been… I don’t think that this is the time to -- I’m not a safe man, Lizzie. I would... I would be a comfort to you in this way, but are you really sure you want to throw your lot in with mine?”

 _“Comfort,”_ she repeated back, incredulous, “Is that really what this feels like? I think it would be easier if it was, safer maybe, but. I know what I want, and I know it’s not just because of Tom or any of that. I thought you felt it too, I thought maybe you even--” she cut herself off and tipped her head back against the wall with a hard thunk, eyes shut tight against incipient humiliation, and whatever regretful look she might find in his face. 

“I guess I was wrong,” she said, flat and dull, and slipped free of his hands which still rested against her arms.

“Lizzy, wait,” he said, urgent and apologetic, but she didn’t want to hear it.

“Good night, Red. I’m sorry if I’ve made things awkward,” she said as she slipped through her door. She closed it behind her without turning and took a step away so she wouldn’t listen for his movements on the other side.

She was entirely certain he would follow her, burst through her door, and entirely certain that he wouldn’t. She counted to ten and he didn’t come in, then twenty, then sixty and still nothing happened. She was shaking, she found, so she breathed deep and tried to escape the feeling that she had just done something irreparable. 

She really had thought... and the way he’d kissed her couldn’t have been -- but obviously she’d misunderstood.

Liz dressed for bed in a rush, as though she wanted to hurry and jump into sleep to escape what had just happened, that blinding joy and it’s swift, gut-wrenching demise. But laying in bed her body still beat with fervent expectancy and frustrated hopes. She laid her hand atop her breast, atop her distressed and reaching-out heart, the way she used to when she was a child alone in the dark, and tried to settle it back in place. _What have I done,_ she thought, _what have I done?_


	13. we may, at first, begin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just a short chapter this time but very signifigant, I think you'll find. 13.5 is in the works but I couldn't just let the cliff hanger hang indefinitely so early update is here. I hope it works for you all! Please be aware that the rating will go up next chapter just to be safe, but I think no one here will mind. (and yes this is a poem I wrote specifically for them.)

We would be beholden to love, as you say,  
and stand out in that field, bare and unarmed  
and helpless before it,  
having given over all defense, and laid aside  
every shielding denial  
and you may find it demeaning, alarming too great a risk answered only by such an intangible reward. ...  
But oh, only we shall be fine, fair things, that glisten in the sun,  
we shall be as gentle woodland creatures that slip  
through passages of trees, unclothed, unwary, mute,  
half glimpsed by stamping travelers in sturdy boots who pause  
in the cool wood but do not linger.  
We shall be as wild things, not pinned to this world  
and unheeding of its strictures  
and, with teeth and claws made ready, proceeding outward,  
passed through the outmost gate, broke free.  
We shall not believe we are too wise to be so moved,  
for we will be as the lovers that the gods did bless  
with a caress of their golden hands atop our heads  
and under their protection, stand unflinching.  
We shall be unscrimping as children,  
who live with lavish wonder,  
who do not expect harm and are unharming,  
and we shall not shy back from the sight  
of our misshapen, mouldering,  
briny hearts, long left hidden and unattended  
but cradle them between us with greatest care.

We shall be  
of the earth and from our great vantage, above it,  
and settling in, descending down to our loamy rest,  
we shall not even then be parted,  
and be never bound and never made to shoulder the yoke  
of dutiful forbearance, never as those penitents,  
harnessed to one another, who fear to speak and be heard  
and instead are mummified by the winding sheet of secrets kept,  
and kept, until they spoil.  
We shall be as every encompassing notion,  
and every disparate, fading note and the silent breathing between--

We shall be all of these,  
if only we may, at first, begin.

\-- We Shall Be, If Only We May

**

As impossible as it seemed, she didn’t even remember what she’d done the night before until she was drying her hair in the bathroom. She’d had so little sleep, and her alarm had gone off so early that she’s stumbled through the first half-hour of the day on autopilot. But then the realization broke over her like a rush of cold water and she felt such mortification, such frustration of spoiled hopes that she wanted to peel off her own skin and leave it behind to stop feeling the strangling sensation of _if only I hadn’t_ and _why didn’t he, I thought he would._

But she couldn’t hide forever, they were still going away, after all. She thought anyway, he hadn’t told her otherwise -- not that she’d seen him. She wasn’t sure how that was going to work, she wasn’t sure how they would continue on being anything to one another, now that she had realized what she wanted, and what he hadn’t wanted after all.

It seemed every shred of her denial had evaporated. This wasn’t an inconvenient attraction that had its teeth in her, nor was it a sense of gratefulness or dependence that had somehow gotten confused. Ever since he’d been back she’d been trying to argue her way out of this sudden, crushing feeling that was both ecstatic and punishing. She couldn’t even say if this was what love was because it was unlike what she’d felt with Tom, when he’d been good, or Josh, or Malcolm. This was bigger, stranger, fiercer, made up of furies and delights, the terrible worry she’d felt when he was away, and the terrible worry she’d felt when he was near -- that he’d see through her or that she’d give herself up to him and not even care what fate befell her or that her shift in allegiance would somehow be noticed by her colleagues and superiors and they would have to outrun catastrophe. 

But all of those had only been a cover for more essential concerns, that she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge. That he might still be a danger to her. That he might simply vanish, perhaps even, most cruelly, at her hastily spoken word as he had once promised. That he did, after all, only view her as a project, the way so many in her life had. She’d been sure, she’d thought -- The way she and Red had spoken as co-conspirators against the world, the way he looked at her, and reached out to touch her with such warmth had led her to hope.

She had acknowledged her feelings and reached out and been denied all at once, all in a span of minutes. _Well, at least it’s all over with,_ she told herself, _at least I know now, and I can start to move on. Maybe I shouldn’t even go with him. I could stay here, I could go back home._

She found that she had folded up, clutching her damp towel to her chest, in her underthings. She was an uncomfortable shape against the cold glass counter top, waiting for the wave of desolation and regret to pass. He thinks I only care for him because I don’t have anything else, she realized, and I know how to argue with that because it’s at least a little bit true.

But it didn’t feel like clinging to a handhold, and it didn’t feel like comfort. It felt like being filled up with fire and light and longing.

She straightened herself up, embarrassed to have been so overcome even just in her own company. You can do this, she told herself, you’re better than this.

**

Red seemed to be bluffing his way through their departure with an air of forced breeziness, asking her if she was packed before she had a chance to ask if he still wanted her along. He was going to pretend nothing had happened and she wasn’t sure for whose benefit that was, but she was willing to let it stand if it made the trip easier.

He bustled them out the door with a narration on why he was forgoing the bother and expense of the plane when the nearest airfield to the retreat was still quite a drive. Once they were under way, he went on to detail what he knew about the apparently ruinously elaborate construction of this house by a leading architect in the 50s and how his family eventually turned it into a kind of hotel and then a retreat for a certain kind of clientele who valued privacy -- which she took to mean celebrities and elite criminals like him. 

It was the kind of manic chatter she used to cut off with a brusque reminder to get to the point and tell her about the case, but there was no case, and the point was one she was sure both of them would rather avoid if possible. She turned him out and crossed her arms, biting down on the urge to find something cutting enough to say to him that would make him retreat for a time.

It wasn’t his fault she’d gotten her hopes up, after all. If they went back to shouting after all this she wasn’t sure how she would cope. Eventually he fell silent on his own, and watched her for a while in her defensive posture, they watched each other. He looked lost, she thought, bewildered, and then closed to her. He looked away

**

The retreat was a beautiful place, modern, expansive and built into the steep hillside, obviously Frank Lloyd Wright inspired. It seemed to be a long way from everywhere, in a wooded area that blended slowly into the landscaped grounds. She could see why Red would come here, it wasn’t so far from civilization to be truly inconvenient, but the atmosphere was peaceful, serene. 

It started to snow as they arrived, little white drifting flakes that melted immediately on hitting the ground, dampening the stony path to the large front door. She didn’t miss Nebraska winters, not in the least, but this little flurry soothed her somehow, the thin grey light and the pattering hush of ice crystals landing -- a sound that was almost imperceptible but also unmistakable, felt like home to her. She felt just a little lighter as they waited at the door.

The woman who let them in welcomed them warmly and introduced herself as Tacy, the granddaughter of the man who had designed and built the house, or rather mansion, and the manager of the retreat. 

She was tall and sturdy and sleek and greeted Red with a particular familiarity that made Liz suspect there was some history there. Tacy had a broad, angular face and golden skin and faded golden hair and palest, watchful eyes under straight, solemn brows -- she was lovely in an almost otherworldly way, her presence strong and peaceful like some kind of nordic priestess and Liz hoped against hope that, if there was history there between this woman and Red, it was long in the past.

“Of course, there isn’t really that much to manage,” said Tacy to her, as of course Red was familiar with the place, “It’s really just my sister, myself and a small staff. We find that people come here to be away from things and we strive to be unobtrusive. And Astrid is a devilishly good cook so we never felt the need bring one in. Now, if you’ll forgive the impertinence, will you be wanting separate rooms?”

She wasn’t sure what possessed her to glance at Red, as though asking his opinion even though he’d been perfectly clear, and she felt her face heat at his blank indifference and Tacy’s patient, questioning gaze. 

“Yes,” she said, firm and polite although perhaps a little strangled, “Separate rooms.”

**

Tacy said her grandfather had tried to name the house Cliff Step but the awkward name had never stuck. Nothing else about the place was awkward, though, it had a solidity to it but also an expansiveness to it, an elegance without being grandiose or cloying. It really was peaceful, not stifling the way his some of his more upscale hideaways seemed.  
Red had quietly disappeared to make a phone call after the greetings and introductions were over, and Tacy had offered to give her a tour of the place so she’d ambled along after the woman and heard nearly nothing she was told about the arduous tale of the house’s construction. She obediently admired the stonework and the the huge, abstract stained glass window in the main staircase and the fine art hung on the walls on the way to her appointed room, but she didn’t really take much of it in.

The place was much bigger than it had looked from the outside and she predicted she was likely to get lost frequently, despite the clear but brief directions Tacy gave her. 

Her room was beautiful and large and had an adjoining bathroom, and after pointing out the amenities, Tacy politely left her to settle in.

Liz had brought along all her bags from her place, which included her laptop and all the files she hadn’t stored with Kaplan’s people. She could keep herself occupied for days with those if she wanted. And if she got her meals delivered, she might not have to face Red at all for the duration. Except he wouldn’t let her be, she was sure, he might not know what he wanted from her but he always did want her attention and when she refused to give it he found ways to force the issue. She had hoped they were finally past those games, wondered if they ever would be. 

She supposed it was just as well, though, they would have to learn to spend time together eventually, the framework of the arrangement hadn’t really changed. It was she that had, her perspective, her intentions, all of it had been rearranged. It was just that she’d thought he’d changed as well, he let her so close and yet kept her so far, like she was some object in orbit, just like she had always denied. She hoped that sometime soon this would bother her, for all she could think at the moment that with some proximity there was some leeway. That she hadn’t forced the issue enough to be cast out entirely.

She felt tired, still, even after napping in the car, which she had despite her intention to stay awake and do some damage control. After more than two months of keeping herself awake and alive with the incandescent glow of adrenaline, her body betrayed her, sensing she was safe and dragging her to sleep as though drugged. She would equalize soon, she’d lived through it enough times to know it would ease, but the dullness and disappointment lingered like a haze.

She sat on her bed and stared out the wide window at the muted grey day and the steady flurry of swiftly melting snow.

**

She didn’t see him again until that night, and they were better at night weren’t they? They always had been, somehow, no matter what else was going on she would find her way to him or he would find his way to her in some dim place or other and his face would be full of some intensity, some softness and she would be less defensive and better able to admit that picking a fight was the last thing she wanted to do. Only now her once-abundant anger wasn’t the obstacle in the path.

She found him in the library, or in fact on the wide, high deck beyond the library doors, leaning on the railing and looking out over the dark landscape and the dim line of the sea beyond. The sky was clear again and it was bitterly cold, she could feel the cold draft from the open french doors from the moment she stepped in the room, but he was standing there in waist coat and shirtsleeves, having made a meandering pattern of foot marks in the fine dusting of snow that had settled as though he had paced for some time before settling and going still. She felt a hard spike of worry and frustration that he would treat himself that way, so carelessly, so heedless of the cold, and she realized that, no matter which way the storm broke between them, she would worrying over him, uselessly, pointlessly, as far into the future as she could see.

Her feet crunched in the tiny amount of snow turned to ice, and he turned to look at her as though daring her to approach -- oh so you’re willing to face me at last, his expression seemed to say, but then she realized she was only superimposing her own bitterness onto him. In actuality, he’d gone tense and wary as though he was ready to be on his guard if she did something particularly vicious again, like shouting or trying to kiss him.

“Tacy said you had something sent up to your room,” he said slowly, carefully, “I thought you’d decided to turn in early.”

“I had,” she said shortly, “It didn’t stick.”

He nodded and seemed to be waiting for her to speak, and it seemed as though he was always positioning her to make the opening volleys, to make her the one who was questioning and showing her hand so that he could respond to it. Lately, perhaps the balance had become more even, he had after all divulged the deep dark secrets she’d demanded, but he still held back. forcing her to set the tone. Perhaps it suited them, she liked to act and he liked to react, but she was growing weary of always being the one stumbling blindly onto that field, always being the one chasing after. Well, let him chase for once, she thought and resolved not to speak, but it was a resolve soon broken.

“How do you think of me?” she said, sounding angry but feeling something like desperation, as though they were already in the middle of a discussion -- and she supposed they were, it had merely been suspended, “I mean, how do you see me? Do you see me as I am right now? Or do you still see me as that girl you once met, or maybe that fantasy image of me you had when we first met? Or… or maybe you’re still disappointed that I’m not what you expected -- I know you were, I know, you were angry at me for a while, for not being… what you’d built me up to be.”

“ _No, Lizzy,_ no never disappointed. Frustrated, yes, with our profound inability to communicate most of the time, and… surprised maybe, at how much more _dynamic_ you are, in person than in second hand accounts but --” he shook his head and looked at her, frustrated still, his eyes so fiercely bright as though he might be able to make her understand by sheer force of will, “Haven’t you ever listened when I told you how remarkable, how capable, how brilliant and alive -- how incredibly precious you are to me? Do you think I’m lying when I tell you these things?”

“I used to. I thought you were trying to… make me uncomfortable, I guess,” she admitted, slowly, and yes she’d thought all sorts of things, although she’d never stopped to puzzle it all the way through, had been afraid to see what she might find. Now, talking it through she was revealing to them both what had lurked beneath the surface, “And then I thought you were manipulating me, trying to create a sense of intimacy. And then… Then I thought, maybe you did mean it. Maybe you meant it and you were just trying to get me to catch up to what you-- to where you were. But I just don’t know, Red. I don’t know what you want from me, still, even after everything. I thought if I knew about the past you would, I don’t know, _make sense._ But you told me and all it did was hurt, and I still don’t know what you think or what you want and I just don’t understand why you would make me think you felt something for me and then push me away and… talk about _finding comfort_ like it was just-- like it was nothing. Like it was _nothing,_ when I thought you and I… So I need you to tell me how you think of me, what you want from me because I just can’t figure it out on my own.”

She was shivering in the cold but she didn’t hunch in on herself, she didn’t drop her gaze, she stood firm, determined, she set her jaw and waited. She saw the magnitude of all she’d said pass over his face, see that he was hurt, unsettled, uncertain, could see him chewing on the inside of his cheek the way he did when he was stymied or trying to decide what to say. She didn’t want that, she didn’t want some carefully worded placation, she needed immediacy, she needed him to tell her the real truth of what he thought.

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Lizzy,” he said quietly, almost defeated, plaintive, “I told you once before that I would stay or go at your word, and I meant it. I will be whatever you need me to be, play whatever role you need me to play, you only need tell me.”

“What the hell does that even mean?” she demanded, voice rising in desperation, “I’m a grown woman, Red, I’ve had my education, I’ve been around the block, I’ve been married -- despite how little good it did me, I was, and for a long, _long_ time before that I looked after myself. I don’t need chivalrous gestures and careful accommodation. I’m not so fragile as all that. I just need you to tell me the truth. Please, just. Straight out, how do you feel about me?”

“Well,” he said, something in his expression shifting to something warm and unbearably fond, but sorry, too, almost resigned, “I love you.”

“What?” she asked, blank, not sure she understood, her thoughts had frozen over his admission, sure it could not be true for it was too simple, too wondrous, half sure it was somehow a trick, or a misunderstanding, that she had somehow misheard. Why would he have pushed her away, made her think his feelings didn’t match hers in any way, why would he have been so cruel?

“I’m in love with you, in fact, completely, utterly. I’m sorry, but it’s true,” he said, and she could see that it was true, even in the low light, such a look in his eyes, such a longing look, hopeful and worried together, and hadn’t she seen that look and it’s fainter echos on him a hundred times these last months. She didn’t doubt him for a moment -- how could she? -- and something in her rose and flared.

“Why should you be sorry?” she asked, gently now, almost soothing, almost kind. She shuffled closer to him now, hands stuffed deep in her sweater pockets so she would not reach out before she understood, before she was sure.

“Because it’s a completely untenable position, for both of us. Because I have nothing to offer you, my life is empty save for flight and destruction and constant maintenance of the machinery that keeps my world afloat, because I could destroy you without even meaning to, just by dragging you under with me. Even when I’ve tried my very best for you I’ve done you immeasurable harm and I know I should simply keep my distance for the duration, but I can’t. I won’t. I’m selfish, you see, greedy,” he stared her down, seeming to draw himself up, trying to loom over her, make himself into the capricious, forceful figure she had once feared. 

But he looked tired and pale, his mouth was soft and turned down at the edges, his eyes pinched as though in pain, and even so she could see the feeling in them, all through the elegant bones of his face as though his devotion had come alight under his skin. The caricature of fury and inhumanity would not appear around him, between them, she could not see it.

All she could see was a wild, pained, weary man called Raymond, who had wandered a long time in the wasteland and fought long in the wars and didn’t remember how to live comfortably in his own skin and not behind a disguise. A man who had just confessed he loved her. She felt the huge, round empty shape of longing in her dissolving, filled up with something warm and patient and abundant. She felt herself leaning into him, lifting up, wasn’t sure if the feeling was real or in the ecstatic space of her mind.

“I don’t see why you would want any part of that,” he confessed, drooping down, giving up the act, the effort of disguise.

“Let me tell you, I wasn’t crazy about the idea myself,” she told him, but she was smiling, beaming, she hardly felt the cold -- there were mere inches between the now and there was warmth there too, “But I’ve gotten used to it.”

His fingertips were cold as ice as the came up to brush the hair from her face, and lingered ever so lightly against the soft-ticklish underside of her jaw -- she felt a thrill race through her -- and he seemed now to be pleading with her. “I could destroy you,” he said again, as though he was admitting to something horrible he had already done.

Well, maybe he had, she was already destroyed and made over again, the false shell of a life she had built around herself had been shattered and her true wilder self had been released at last, awakened with her new, clear-sighted eyes and the unsinking, unbowed engine of her heart. She was free now, and strong and endless, and she could see him in the dark before her, a jagged, shattered shape, a thing gone feral in the dark that snapped at danger but he bowed before her in tenderest love and she judged him good. 

“Yes,” she said, and it was fond, matter of fact, a benediction, “You could. And I could destroy you. But I never would, do you hear me? _We never would._ We’ll be alright. We’ll look after each other.”

She reached up and caught his hand in both of hers and turned it gently, and kissed his smooth, cold palm and let herself feel the force of love burning brighter, larger than herself, expanding the edges of herself outward in yearning and accommodation, knowing he was there now to meet her. She felt sure in that moment, that though perhaps the first brilliant flare would fade in time, the hugeness of this affection, this necessity would outpace in the end every tribulation that faced them.

“I don’t have a word for what I feel,” she whispered, raising her face from his hand, “It’s different than what I’ve known. It’s… wider. More. But I think you should kiss me, okay, Raymond? This time, I really think you should kiss me.”

And he did, interrupting the end of her request, her demand, but that was alright because he gathered her up and kissed her with such a fervour and he didn’t push her away and try to deny himself, or her. He whispered pleas for forgiveness against her skin and she cradled the shorn round shape of his skull in her two palms trying to soothe the anguish she felt in him that she didn’t understand. _It’s alright, _she murmured to him, over and over, _we’re alright_ , until he stopped her reassurances with his gentle mouth.__

“Let’s go inside,” he suggested, tenderly, against her flushed cheek, “It’s awfully cold, don’t you think?”


	14. on a winter's day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> an interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there is no adequate excuse for such a long delay, and this chapter in itself is not so eventful. It's an establishing, emotional sort of exploration and I hope you will find some merit in it. The next chapter is already half completed so I'm hopeful it will be ready before the holiday, which is handy as it's holiday themed... after a fashion. If you wait long enough what was out of season because appropriate again i guess. I'm just glad to be past the bad place of the last couple months and be able to produce work again.

We sailed away on a winter's day  
with fate as malleable as clay;  
but ships are fallible, I say,  
and the nautical, like all things, fades.

And I can recall our caravel:  
a little wicker beetle shell  
with four fine masts and lateen sails,  
its bearings on Cair Paravel.

O my love,  
O it was a funny little thing  
to be the ones to've seen.

\-- Bridges and Baloons, Joanna Newsom

**

They went for a walk down to the sea the next day, early in the afternoon, bundled up well under the white winter sun. The grounds and the scenery was beautiful, though the walk was steep down to the sand, intervals of boardwalk and stairs. It was mostly an excuse to walk arm in arm while they could, pressed together from shoulder to hip. She felt flushed despite the freezing, whirling sea breeze and he kept looking over at her as though checking she was still there, and reaching over to stroke her fingers where they gripped the crook of his arm.

In the light of day it seemed impossible to speak with the openness and and intensity that they had in the night, but the feeling of connection, and relief had not lessened. She had not been willing to let him stray from her sight for very long at a time, and Raymond too seemed to feel that, now that touch was allowed, he was going to keep a grip on her as much of the time as was feasible. 

She supposed she should feel claustrophobic, or find his behavior at least a bit possessive, but his hand against her back or cradling her arm or gripping her waist didn’t feel like an attempt to dominate or control her, not in the least. She kept turning around to meet his gaze to find him looking her with such open affection and disbelief before he noticed her attention and tried to return to his customary nonchalance, and she was certain she was doing much the same. Now that she was allowed to look and look at him, take in every feature and affect without fearing what he thought of her, she was unable to restrain herself.

She wondered, kept wondering how they were going to manage this when they got back to DC, to reality. It was good they were away for this first magnetic clinging, but even so, people were bound to notice very quickly.

**

She had loved Malcolm completely, or believed she had. He wasn’t like the confused, distractible boys she’d dated briefly, but in the end he was just as selfish, just as needy. He was thirty-seven and her professor for a semester in her sophomore year of college, and she had continued to seek him out. She approached him with the confidence of a precocious girl who had always spent as much time with her father and aunt’s friends as her age peers and who was used to relying on her intelligence to make an impression. He responded to her as though she were a grown woman and not a girl of newly twenty-one, which she found intensely gratifying and yet terrifying. 

Their positions as student and professor, though he was no longer her professor specifically, the complications of his estranged wife and her disapproving father, his intense genius, and her natural prodigy and her vanity in her awareness of it, all lent an air of drama and intensity that appealed to her. The sensations of persecution and escape, the initial ease of their discourse, the first wild attraction she had felt towards him all made it easy to fall into her first love. She let herself become enamoured of their own their own narrative, let it wind her up and make her believe in its permanence and inevitability. For years afterward she believed she would never feel anything quite that profound again, and given how badly, crushingly wrong it all went in the end, she had thought it was for the best.

The affair with Malcolm was an education in many ways. She began by trying to convince him of her maturity, many of their early fights had been about her fear that he viewed her as childish, perhaps not able to make her own decisions. She had overcompensated, she realized later, trying to take on a caretaker role for Malcolm she hadn’t truly been prepared for. His tendencies towards despair, his grave self doubt had moved her, she’d tried to take him on but he was too much. She couldn’t cope, not with how much he wanted from her, and how much she still wanted to accomplish in her own life. In time love had turned to claustrophobia, to bitterness, and she told herself she had learned her lesson, she would never again become so subsumed in someone else’s life, never again be tempted down into the cloying trap of codependence.

But in the beginning, before things soured, when they had been happy and playing house, she had found with Malcolm all the pleasures of intimacy that she had worried were reserved for other people -- let down by earlier fumblings. She had been unafraid with him, at first. She had been unself conscious and it had freed her from the remote tower of her still mind, that always seemed to want to watch the sticky business at a remove, so that she could experience immediacy, pleasure, reciprocation. She learned what her body could do, what it could feel, if she let herself live in sensation. She learned how to be bold and speak for herself even while naked, even while wanting, even while unwanting. 

Malcolm was careful with her, wanted to say what she liked and didn’t like all the time, liked the reassurance she supposed. Liked that she’d become his project, that little bit of masculine ego in him was proud of being her first great love and her first real lover. He was always so very sure that he knew so much about the human mind, about human sexuality, that he had so much to show her, so much he could tell her. She found it empowering, until she found it grating.

Eventually sex had become like a weapon between them, a tool to forestall arguments when she got frustrated with him, or to try to comfort him when he was gripped with doubt and anger. She lost track of how to stay in the moment, feel pleasure and sentiment together, felt some ever-deepening divide between her body and her mind, that lingered long after she and Malcolm had parted ways. 

After Malcolm there were others, not many only a few, casual relationships she broke off quickly, feeling a sick sense of weakness, claustrophobia when they wanted to know her too well or keep her too close or questioned her ambition, or liked her body too well when she could only feel the simplest attraction that was soon sated and made almost repulsive. Then there had been Josh, and they’d been two independent people, she’d thought they had a chance, that they could care about each other without getting all tangled up in each other’s lives and getting caught, but she’d been wrong there too.

She was sure that she was built without quite the same capacity for love that other people held, that she had a certain rigidity, a certain selfishness that didn’t allow for it. She enjoyed sex as much as the next person, she supposed -- though it was a pleasure that often soured quickly on her tongue like a treat craved for that disappoints -- and she wanted companionship, to be supported and cared for. But she harboured a terror of being depended on by someone whose needs she couldn’t meet, a horror of being expected to be something she wasn’t for the rest of her life. 

Everything else she felt on a huge scale, hopes and ambition, anger that sometimes seemed to singe everything around her or drive her into unintended consequences. And loneliness, longing, that too she felt like an empty space inside that was larger than anything she could possibly contain. Affection and tenderness seemed to come easily enough, given time, it was just that even when she thought love was within reach, she still felt impatience when she should feel fondness, dread when she had hoped to feel generosity.

As much as she wanted her normal life, her family and sense of home, the middle class american fairy tale that Tom had presented her, she had always been afraid that she was unequal to it. That she would begin to feel the walls closing in. That she would run out of love and patience with her husband and her potential children.

As much as she was hurt by Tom’s betrayal, the trick he had played, it was also a relief. In some small way she knew she had been released from a dream that would eventually have strangled her if it had been real.

What she felt for Red, for Raymond, both of him, all of him, had been such a shock, such an impossibility. He didn’t expect anything from her. Only expected her capability, her brilliance and competence, her fury and her fear, her trust. He didn’t expect her to be his mother or his wife or his lover, he didn’t demand her love. He was dumbfounded in the face of it. He touched her with such reverence, such care.

She would do anything for him, she realized, wouldn’t be able to help herself. She was frightened, almost frightened but also relieved, also electrified with joy. The trick was, she supposed, to find herself in over her head while she wasn’t looking, to be not trying to will herself to stretch but to open her eyes and find herself already stretched, already made massive and benevolent with love. 

**

She led him to her room by the hand, hers because it was the nearer and she wasn’t about to undress on some stranger’s couch no matter how tempted. They’d gotten stalled on the library couch for more than a few minutes because Liz had wanted to catch her breath somewhere warm -- although she hadn’t exactly caught her breath because she’d dragged Raymond down on top of her, unwilling to be even inches apart and he’d eagerly kissed her until she couldn’t even think -- but the mohair plush was itchy through her soft knit shirt and she’d demanded a change of venue.

“We don’t have to rush into anything,” he reminded her gently, but the sentiment was undercut by the breathless quality of his tone, the way he crowded against her back, “Word and deed don’t necessarily have to follow one right after the other, however… enjoyable it might be.”

She caught his hand where it was splayed against her abdomen and pressed it tighter against her skin under her shirt and waited until they were safely shut into her room before turning to face him. Just the look on his face, the heat and intensity made her knees weak and she didn’t even try to find reason or restraint. 

There was only feverish, urgent wanting, and the surety of the love he had confessed, and the realization that she’d always expected to end up here, pressed together, asking his body to speak to hers -- maybe not from the moment of their first meeting, but indecently soon after. His fingers had landed in the dip of her back as she turned and he stroked her there, making her shiver and lose her train of thought for several long moments as she leaned into him.

“This is not rushing,” she managed at last, meeting his eyes, tracing the beautiful line of his cheekbone, his eyebrow with her gentle fingertips, trying to fix in her mind the image of how he looked at her as though she was a revelation, “If you you had any idea how long I’ve wanted… This is not rushing, I promise.”

“How long, then?” he wanted to know.

But she distracted him by stepping the minimum distance away to strip off her loose, soft sleep clothes and stand naked before him as though daring him to try to think of anything but her bare skin, her body, her bold overture. 

“Christ, Lizzy…” he breathed, low as she’d ever heard. She watched his eye darken, planning out exactly how he would touch her, take her, she could see it, she was sure -- found herself moaning aloud at the hard ache that provoked in her in response.

Then he was crowding her again and she was tugging desperately at his clothes, trying to get to skin, hot and shaky and out of control. She found herself thinking again, _anything, anything, I would do for you anything, I would let you do to me anything,_ and knew they were so far from healthy, that this was nothing to do with salvation, but she was too far in, she couldn’t even wish for a different fate.

He wanted to go slowly, he wanted to savour, told her he intended to make a meal of her, show her all he could do. But she wasn’t interested in planned and plotted intimacy, she didn’t want honed skill, not at first, not as they were just learning how they fitted together -- Later, she told him, that’s really nice but _later_ , and pushed and pulled at him and whined and clung until he was just as frantic as she, not separate and thinking, but immediate and present.

It wasn’t that she didn’t mind that he saw her in this state, or that she was unselfconscious. It was that she was eager for him and wanted him to see, it was that for once she wasn’t trying to ignore the over-vulnerable, messy mechanics of the act in favour of whatever sentiment and thoughtless satiation she could find. 

Raymond was there with her in every moment, eager and hesitant both, and he loved her enough to kill for her, to die for her, saw her as a whole person, wild, furious and untamable. And would go on doing so even though he saw her sweaty and naked, bent his mouth to her neck, her breast, spread her wide and dipped his fingers in her wet sex, heard her cry out in pleasure. 

She was in love and in lust and she wanted him to know, didn’t hesitate for she knew that inviting this, demanding it, would never diminish her in his eyes. And when she was recovered enough that she could do more than moan and writhe she turned her attention to his body with equal thoroughness and found that her power over him was just as absolute. 

They could devour each other whole and still survive, she realized as she met his eyes in the low light, saw the taught, hungry, awestruck look on his face as she invited him in, as they were finally, finally, _at last,_ joined, and she wondered if she would ever catch her breath again. She knew her face mirrored is, knew she was making a sound of such profound relief and longing, knew that they would only be stronger for this. 

They had always been better without words.

**

Actually sleeping together, or resting and trying to sleep, was more fraught that she had anticipated. Having retreated each to their own side of the bed by tacit agreement, too hot and limp to lie together. Liz dozed for a while in mild euphoria and was somehow perfectly cognizant of Raymond beside her in the back of her numbed mind, and soon the weight of his sleep drew her down and down deeper into rest, and that was good, that was wonderful. Real sleep, real happy relaxation returning like an old friend for the first time in months and months, like slipping into a warm bath.

But she had spent too long half-dozing in stillness beside her imposter husband, months at a time, the first time when she had suspected and the second time when she had known. Her sleeping body remembered her profound fear of the sleeping body of the one who had lain beside her at that time, the cold alien thing that had called itself Tom. She kept jerking awake to check that it was her own love, her own protector that slept beside her and not the other one, fearful in a brain addled with sleep, that she had somehow slipped back in time, or that these last, overwhelmingly intense days with Raymond had only been a dream. That she was back in that cold room in that cold bed she had thought she’d left for good.

He woke with her one time as she wrested herself awake yet again, just to check, half drowsing and half alarmed. He seemed to react to her tension, sitting up and reaching for the bedside lamp and any of his discarded clothes that he could reach, asking her urgently, “What is it? What’s going on? Did you hear something?”

“No, no it’s alright, it’s nothing, Red,” she mumbled as her mouth tried to catch up to her alertness, habit superseding familiarity. She reached out and pressed her hand to the smooth skin between his shoulder blades and stroked him there, feeling the taut muscles shift, trying to halt his progress from under the covers. 

“Really,” she said, fully awake now, and waited for him to give up on getting up and turn to face her, “I’m fine, nothing happened, it’s just stupid. I… Asleep me doesn’t seem to remember that I’m not still hiding from Tom. Habit, I guess.”

He nodded slowly, sad realization smoothing his worried brow. “Yes, I can see… I understand habit,” he said, voice rough with sleep.

And yes, she’d just seen, hadn’t she? He had to be conditioned to react immediately on waking, to whatever situation he found himself in. She should have expected, she supposed, she hadn’t really given it much thought. He gave the impression of being a man completely unafraid and completely in control and unassailable, but she was coming to understand that was just an impression, that the serene persona was largely cover for hard work and deep trauma and multitude of other things she was just starting to see. She didn’t embarrass him by call attention to just how much she had perceived, not there and then in the middle of the first night.

She sat back against the pillows and stared blankly out into the dark room beyond the comfortable light of the lamp, regretting profoundly that she had said _that man’s_ name, bringing the specter of him, of her past with him into the room and into bed with them -- but then, neither of them were likely to forget. Certainly her unconscious mind hadn’t forgotten Tom so quickly.

“Would you like me to go back to my room, Lizzy?” Raymond asked, breaking into her winding thoughts, “You might rest easier that way.”

“No, please don’t, I want you to stay -- I always want you to stay. Lately I’ve been wishing... But I got so used to thinking that you shouldn’t, that I shouldn’t,” she stopped, too slowed with exhaustion to find a way to put words to the way she had wrestled with the stark divide between what she wanted and what she knew she ought to want. She shook her head and ran her hand across his shoulder blade, his firm shoulder until she felt him relax and decide to remain.

She slid back down under the covers, feeling chilled and over-exposed for the first time that night, and he carefully followed suit, watching her with dark, solemn eyes. She felt the crushing weight of all the horrors that surrounded them back in the real world rush over her again, and realized that for a time she had forgotten, but from the gentle look on his face she was sure Red hadn’t. She gave a shaky sigh and reached over him to turn the lamp back off.

“Just hold on to me, will you,” she said, very small and plaintive, “I’ll know it’s you if you just hold on to me.”

He reached for her eagerly and he helped her turn so they were back to front, and curled all around her under the rustling eiderdown in a tight little knot that was sure to grow stifling hot later, but she felt secure at last. This was Red here with her, Tom was gone, she wasn’t going to wake up alone and teetering on the edge of her old bed and the edge of terror. 

“I thought you wanted space,” he said, slowly stroking her side, her hip, as she went lax against him, “You pulled away and I didn’t want to take more than you would give.”

“I didn’t want to crowd you,” she said, embarrassed and unwilling to explain how asking for simple affection had always made her feel more vulnerable even than sex, and that it had only gotten worse as her relationship with Tom had worn on and she’d come to realize her husband had only tolerated her occasional clinginess.

“Oh, dear heart. That’s just silly. You have actually met me, haven’t you?” he said against the crown of her head, clutching her tighter for emphasis, “Always, always crowd me as much as you like.”

She soaked in being held, completely held. She must have had this before, she thought, at least once -- not Josh, she’d been so careful with him to keep herself independent, or Tom, after she’s worn through his patience, but with Malcolm, she supposed, before they started wearing on each other’s nerves. It felt familiar and yet completely new, lying limp and easy in his tight grip, feeling his warm breath against her scalp, stroking his wrists and forearms to encourage them more tightly in place.

“It’s always been hard for me to ask for… I’ve always kept myself separate, you see,” she confided into the quiet space they’d made, “I’ve always been on my guard, trying to not seem childish or needy, not to invite something that would give rise to feelings of… ownership. I have that kind of face, that kind of past, it makes people -- men -- want to take over for me, take me in hand. Wrap me up in batting and pat me on the head and tell me how I ought to be living. I was sure you were going to be like that, too, with that big, commanding persona of yours,” she stroked his fingers lightly and wriggled backwards, trying to get closer to negate the implied criticism, “But you haven’t been, you’ve let me fly around making my own, at times incredibly stupid, decisions and you’ve never once tried to bring me to heel.”

She took a nervous breath and encouraged his hand higher, warm and smooth-palmed with calloused fingertips against her breast, and surely he could feel how hard and fast her heart was beating beneath with the vulnerability of her admission. He caressed her and she arched into his touch, love and desire running right through her like one great electric pulse under her sternum and between her legs.

“If I’d had to bully you into it, it would have been worthless, not real, not your choice. Of course we had our moments early on, I know I pushed too hard. But later on, you pushed right back so I had hope. I was never interested in taking you in hand, as you so delightfully put it. I think in fact that it has to be the other way around. I’ve wandered, over the years, gone wrong, gotten lost… and my decisions have only led me farther in. But you, I think, are blessed somehow.”

“Blessed!” she exclaimed in disbelief, craning around to look at see his face but catching only a glimpse before his gentling hands coaxed her back down against him, “You should know better than anyone how ridiculous that sounds.”

“But you are. You are clever and clear-sighted, you see right through me. Your moral compass still finds North,” he murmured to her, so completely earnest and heartfelt, “You’ve waded into the mire and it hasn’t claimed you. You’re my tender-hearted girl with a core of steel.”

“That’s some pedestal you’ve put me on,” she said, wary and stunned, flattered and alarmed, thinking _oh god, he really means it, he really thinks I’m going to be the one to guide him through this._ And then, after a few seconds on the brink of panic she relaxed, realized that this too was a part of the anything she would do for Raymond. _Mine to look after,_ she thought, _He is mine to look after. No one else ever could, but I love him so he is mine._

“It’s not a pedestal, Lizzy, I promise you. It’s just that solid ground is a long way up from where I stand,” he said, and pressed kisses along the side of her neck and caressed her again and distracted her completely from anything less visceral than touch and scent and sensation.

**

As they walked down by the sea, down on the hard packed wet sand with the bone-deep sound of the surf and the churning cold air, they let all conversation die. It was beginning to sink in, she supposed, what they’d done, how they’d tied themselves to one another. The fine wires of trust they had strung not so very long ago had become entirely binding but she did not repent or regret, she was surer than she’d been about anything in years. But exalted feeling aside, the future seemed only more insurmountable. 

It was just the same as when she thought he had rejected her, the framework of their lives, her job, his list, Berlin, Tom, the tenuous agreement with the Justice Department for his immunity, none of it was altered. They could not go on just as before, the idea of it was abhorrent, and yet they couldn’t fail to. Her job would pull her back in, and his work, his network would have to be maintained just as much as before. To try to carry on an affair in secret would be recklessness incarnate and to have it in the open was downright suicidal, but to give it up, to give Raymond up was impossible. She couldn’t even think of it without feeling a soft kind of suffocation. 

She found her legs didn’t want to carry her forward and she stopped, gripping Raymond’s arm hard enough with both hands she felt him flinch just a little before he turned to look at her. 

“What the hell are we going to do?” she said, sounding far more frantic than she’d meant to.

“Well, I assumed we’d head back to the house when we’ve soaked up enough sea air, and then perhaps lunch, or --”

“No, Red, you know what I mean,” she cut in, “I mean when we go home and you’re still you and I’m still an agent and nothing’s really changed. Except everything has. What do we do? What’s the plan?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and turned them to face the silver blue water rushing toward and from them.

“What? How can you not know, you always have a plan. You may not always tell me but I know you always have one.”

“Oh, my dear… I should have come clean with you sooner, I suppose, but you look at me with these big, worried eyes sometimes and I can’t help but try to be reassuring,” he said, “The truth is I’m an old fraud. I must maintain an appearance, I do that very well. But in actuality I have a plan far less often than you seem to think, although your faith in me is heartening. For the smaller gambits, yes, I have notions and contingencies and suspicions, but on the larger scale, for what I began when I came to you… I knew that I must save you and I knew that I had something to offer you to get your attention, and I knew that whoever had targeted you to get to me had to be stopped or risk dooming us both. I had a trajectory in mind, but recently the waters have become muddied.”

“Muddied. What does that mean?”

“It means I didn’t initially see how powerful an enemy I would be facing, or that his, or their, motive would seem to be something more than simple greed. I still don’t have a clear vision of the situation and don’t know if I can explain how unusual or how dangerous that is. But mainly, if I haven’t adequately buried the lead, it means you. I didn’t expect you. How I would feel about you. How you would really be, what a force of will you would bring to bare. How I would… lose all perspective. I didn’t expect you might willing to accept me farther than just enough to save your life -- and even that far looked like a stretch after we got off to such a start as we did.”

And oh, what a rocky start it had been, she’d never been so angry at someone, or so often, in her life, the memory of that rage still sparked a kind of fear in her -- that she could be that out of control. That should have been a sign, she supposed, that he could make her feel everything so much more than anyone else she’d ever met. But it wasn’t a romantic thought, it frightened her right in that moment. What if she was ever that angry with him again, now that they were locked together in this way, what if he was? It would be a blood bath, they would tear each other to pieces long before they would give up and let go. She knew this, she knew it. Oh god, what are we going to do? 

But just as much as it frightened her, it didn’t inspire her to want to give up or run away. She looked down prospect of their joint futures with a sweet kind of inevitability. If they were to make each other miserable later, at least they were happy now -- and this was all supposing either or both of them had futures that lasted past the next few months. There was still Tom. There was still Berlin. There was still that goddamn list of human monstrosities he was feeding them piece by piece like shovel-fulls of coal to keep the steam-contraption moving. 

He was still the weary General in the Invisible War. And he didn’t have a plan. He didn’t have a plan. He’d never had a plan. 

Between the roaring sea and the changeful air and this revelation she had a sudden feeling of insubstantiality. She felt as though she was the still pinprick spot in the center of something great and wheeling and out of control. She drooped in the face of this, her hands going lax around Raymond’s arm, her head dropping down so that she could press it against the curve of his shoulder. 

“You don’t have a plan,” she said against the rustling material of his blue coat. Her favourite one of his, she’d always thought in some corner of her mind she’d pretended not to notice. 

The one he’d worn down into that underground bunker and she’d had to concentrate on pretending to be a hacker while he rested his hand on her back. That whole stint under cover he’d rested his hand on her back, clutched protectively at her arm, hovered right behind of her or right in front, and she’d felt… warmed, calmed, more secure by his proximity. That was the first time. And then he’d killed without hesitation in her defense and she’d felt sickened, and annoyed at herself for letting her guard down. But that night was still the first night she’d dreamt of him, him in that blue coat, watching her, hovering, crowding against her while guiding her through dark, confusing places with his hand firm and hot on her spine. 

He had seemed all-powerful then. But even then he hadn’t had a plan. He had a trajectory in mind, he’d said, whatever that meant. And notions, and contingencies. It was like finding out that the person chauffeuring you around for the last six months never got their license or finding out that your parents were never married, or that gravity only worked by a collective effort of wishing very hard, a sudden counting up of ways that you were not safe, had never been safe, and you’d never even realized.

He reached out, to comfort her, to support her but she took a step back and looked out over the long stretch of deserted beach and dune grass and grey sea instead.

“Why did you even tell me that?” she asked, sharp, annoyed.

“I thought we were being honest now. You deserved to know, it concerns us both in the long run. Even if we hadn’t become… it still would have concerned us both,” he said calmly, solemn but unapologetic.

“You really don’t have an exit strategy for all this?”

“Not as such, no. It’s an evolving situation, you see that, don’t you? You and I, the both of us and Berlin, the both of us and the Bureau, or the Oversight Committee, however you choose to define it, it’s all in flux.” He sighed and took her elbow in that gentle but possessive way that always made her go still and biddable, and made her turn, caught her gaze to be sure she was paying attention. His eyes looked clear green and depthless in this blue and silver day and he seemed awfully amused and exasperated for the way she knew she was frowning at him. 

“It’s not as though I’ve got no idea what I’m doing,” he continued, insistent, “I’ve come to find it the most effective method over the years. I learn as much as I can, I excavate the situation, get the lie of the land and then I let the course of action… formulate. It’s not as if you can guarantee that all the players in your play will perform exactly like components in an immense Rube Goldberg machine. I can’t afford be rigid in my thinking. I can’t be predictable, do you understand?”

“Yeah, actually, I guess I do. If you had been at all predictable, Ressler’s team would have brought you in years ago. Now there’s a strange thought.”

“Yes. Not our Donald, of course, he was never very close at my heels, though I’d wouldn’t tell him that if I were you. It would bruise that fragile ego of his. But there were certain others with darker motives who might have came close.”

“I don’t understand how you can live like that, with so much uncertainty. I keep looking into my own future and…,” she shook her head, “I’ve always had a set of goals, always some next thing I’m working towards and now there’s just this haze... and it makes me want to curl up in a ball and hide.”

“It gets easier with practice. Not quickly but it does -- Which is not reassuring, I know. I wish I could promise you something better, something definite and concrete, but I have only myself to offer. It’s not the home and the stability you deserve but... no matter what else may happen you’ll be safe, and I will do everything in my power to make you happy. You will have me, Lizzy, for as long as you want me. I know that’s not much in the greater scheme, but it’s all I can offer.”

“No, you’re wrong… It’s a lot, it’s huge. It’s more than I’ve had in so, so long. I do depend on you, you know, I have. Maybe for longer than I’ve trusted you, even. And I want you, I want this so very much, I don’t know the words to say how much. It’s just. I have a lot at stake here. We both do, of course we both do, but I think I have more that’s directly at risk. My job, my standing with the law, a career and a settled life, things which to you are already forfeit, and I think extraneous and uninteresting to you. I don’t know. I’ve felt them all slipping away from me, but if we were discovered, even the hope of them would be taken away.” 

“I know. Believe me, Elizabeth, I know just how much you have to lose here. I’m not blind to how my influence warped the path of your life even before I blundered in to tear it all apart,” he said, “But this is who we are and where we are, and nothing I know can change that. And I can’t and won’t apologize for being so very glad you’re here with me now, or for wanting what we have. However, it’s your decision, it must be. Please know I won’t hold it against you if you find the risk is too much.”

“Don’t be idiotic, of course it’s _worth the risk_. Why would you say something like that? We’re here now, this is what we are, just like you said. I won’t give it up, no one can make me, not even you, do you understand?” she said, sharp and urgent, and remembering that she could, she wound her arms around his waist and dug her fingers in, wanting him to see that she was not giving up, not proposing surrender. 

“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t make it easy for you to send me away,” he said and smiled with the sly humour she was used to, but still she thought he looked a little resigned. He pulled her closer. "But you are the one with a life above ground you can still turn back to. I don't want you to go into this thinking I would put my feelings ahead of your needs and pressure you into something that you wouldn't naturally choose."

"Well I choose us. You know me, once I've chosen somebody I don't let go, it takes a crack in reality to shake me off. I just... think we have to be extremely careful and I don't really know what that looks like."

"We have time for that, a little time. Let's just be us for now, alright Lizzy? The strategy will come, but for let's just try to be..." he shook his head a little as though the word escaped him.

"Happy?" she said and marveled a little at how the concept had become almost fantastical.

"Yes, my love, let's try to be happy," he said and kissed her temple, smiling, beaming in a way she'd never seen. 

"Alright," she said, thinking it might, in spite of everything, be possible, "let's try."


	15. christmas eve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly, I'm going to ask you to pay attention to some original characters for a little while but please be patient. Secondly, I'm sorry. I'm just sorry. And I hope this is tasteful rather than maudlin, but i don't have it in me to keep reworking (there's an old quote, you're never done with a piece of writing, you just get so sick of it you have to stop).

Christmas night, it clutched the light, the hallow bright  
Above my brother, I and tangled spines  
We smoked the screen to make it what it was to be  
Now to know it in my memory

And at once I knew I was not magnificent  
High above the highway aisle  
(Jagged vacance, thick with ice)  
But I could see for miles, miles, miles

\-- Holocene, Bon Iver

 

**

They had a late lunch with Tacy and her sister Astrid in the hugely wide and open kitchen, at the enormous butcher block table. She could tell that Raymond was considered more friend or even family than guest to these two women, and that he wanted her to get to know them, though he didn’t explicitly tell her so. She listened quietly while the three of them caught up, not with the boisterous over-jollity that she’d seen him use with contacts with which he maintained strained friendships, but with real if subdued interest and fondness. 

Astrid looked very like her sister, equally tall and lithe with much the same round, angular face, though she wasn’t as tanned and weathered as her sister and her hair was glossy red brown not rough gold. There was a quietness to her that drew Liz’s attention, a steady strength and a sad quietness. It seemed Astrid had a daughter, who he also knew and doted on from from afar though the girl was grown and gone off to college. Astrid handed him a greeting card from her daughter Daisy and Liz looked on with sharper curiosity than she felt comfortable with as Raymond read it with a warm smile and tucked it away in the pocket of his jacket which he had draped over the back of his chair.

“She’s home for the winter holiday, you should come to the little house and say hello,” Astrid told Raymond, “She’d love to see you but I couldn’t convince her to come up with me today, says she’s still catching up on her rest. She’s pushing herself so hard at school, I can tell she’s exhausted.”

“Daisy’s majoring in cultural anthropology at Columbia,” Tacy put in towards Liz, very much the proud auntie, “Her father was a genius with technology, but she’s much more interested in people and folklore. She’s got his determination though, she’s pushing herself hard but she loves it.”

“I’m sure she does. I was much the same in school,” said Liz, “My father worried and I had to take up running to work off all the stress but I wouldn’t have slowed down for anything. Of course it helps that you barely have to sleep when you’re 19 and can live on coffee and cheese pizza with impunity,” she added with a smile which Astrid returned readily.

After they were finished with their meal, Raymond excused himself to make another call to Dembe who was keeping an eye on things back in DC. She rose when he left he brushed a hand along her back, just a fleeting gesture to maintain their closeness, and she caught his fingers for a second as he pulled away, a gesture equally brief and equally necessary. He looked worried, she realized as he met her eyes with another of those small, nearly disbelieving smiles, but she couldn’t tell if it was worry over the situation back home or simply the day, the anniversary. It was Christmas Eve after all.

She was curious about these women, with their strange, serene ways tucked away in this beautiful house, removed from everything. She couldn’t quite picture how Red with his rough and tumble life had collected them, or they him.

“You two seem to be getting on better,” said Tacy to Liz as she cleared away the lunch plates.

Liz felt herself flush hot, and was thankful the woman had turned away. Only a day ago as they’d checked in she’s still felt Raymond’s rejection like a catastrophic blow, and now, well. They’d expressed their devotions to one another, now she knew how it felt to have him inside her, knew his scent, his touch, they seemed hardly able to bare being parted, but she didn’t know if that qualified as ‘getting on better.’ It wasn’t comfortable, or cozy and serene, they were still awkward, and over-intense in the face of this new vital necessity.

“Yes,” she said with surprising calm, “Just getting away from… all the other things has been a help. We’ve both been through a lot recently.”

“I hope your stay here will help you decompress, then,” said Astrid, “It’s peaceful out here, and the sea is nourishing somehow. I don’t know if it’s the waves or the wind or the positive ions but it clears the cobwebs. I didn’t realize how much I depended on it until I lived in the city for a time.”

“Raymond says he comes here every year,” said Liz, trying out how it felt to say his name to someone that wasn’t him. It felt proprietary and strange, but right and good. It gave her a little thrill to know he was hers to speak of casually now -- and she realized she would have to get all the joy of it she could now, because once they were back in DC she would have to be so careful not to slip.

Astrid hummed an agreement distractedly as she began wiping down the counters and getting out ingredients for baking, fully engrossed, but Tacy glanced shrewdly at Astrid and Liz in turn.

“She wants to know the story, Trin. Of how we know Red. Is that alright?” Tacy asked her sister, but did so looking down kindly at Liz, who blushed again, chagrined at her curiosity, her jealousy, but she didn’t demure.

“Yes, I don’t mind,” said Astrid, “But you tell it. I need to start the bread. And open some wine, alright? It’s a hard story,” she said to Liz, “But they always are, aren’t they, especially at Christmas. You’re the first person he’s ever brought with him these last eight years since, and the first time he’s turned up entirely sober, so I think that’s a sign you should know.”

Astrid was right, it was a hard story, though it was told in the friendly kitchen with it’s long sunny windows looking out on the picturesque grounds and a strip of sea, while the air was warm and sweet from the smell of yeast and orange zest and the tale eased by sips of sweet white wine. It did make her understand thought, that no matter how serene as these women seemed, and no matter how beautiful their setting, they were just as aware of the capricious, brutal, bloody nature of the real world that lurked beneath the surface as she and Red were.

Astrid had married a man she met in university, an astonishingly brilliant young man called Jonah who had a knack for computers and programming. They were happy, and he found work easily and advanced easily and before long they had a nice house outside the city and a little girl and very bright futures all around. Only Jonah was transferred to a new department and wasn’t allowed to talk about what he did, not that Astrid cared, she didn’t understand it anyway, and Jonah didn’t think much of it, everything in the tech world was kept top secret. By the time Daisy was eight he’d been promoted again and offered a position on a top secret group working out of DC with the kind of pay rise that would guarantee Daisy’s ivy league career and also ease the burden of keeping up their grandfather’s sweeping mansion where they hoped to someday to return when Jonah had earned autonomy to begin his own projects. 

So they sold up and moved. Jonah thought he was working for a group that was contracted by the government, but after some time it was clear that what they did was beginning to trouble Jonah. Then one night Red appeared, introduced himself to Jonah, cajoled him into having a drink. Told him that this group was not officially sanctioned, that their oversight committee was a group of officials using their power maintain deeply illegal projects off the books. He asked Jonah to monitor their work, to keep a record if he could. No more than that, acting in any way unusual would be dangerous, but someone needed to keep track of what was happening so it couldn’t all be swept under the rug. Jonah turned him down, told him if it was that dangerous he wanted no part of it.

Jonah tried to transfer out but subtle threats scared him enough to make him stay in place. After some time his conscience got the better of him and he contacted Red again, agreed to start keeping records. As long as he was careful no one should ever know, and it was better being idly complicit. What he didn’t tell Red was that he’d planned to blackmail his way out with the data he’d collected, his silence for his family’s lifelong safety and freedom. It might have worked too, if he hadn’t made the final gesture of stealing the four most important hard drives he had access to, and they were missed before he could get his plan in motion and contact Red to get his family out of town. He’d aimed too high, thinking he could buy their freedom, and if not, bring down the enemy by publishing it all, all the dirty dealings, the money changing hands, the tracking of certain citizens and the data being handed off to foreign addresses.

“They took Daisy,” said Astrid, “She was only gone for two nights, but it felt like years. They told us Daisy for the hard drives and it would all be over, but of course they didn’t mean it. Jonah brought Red and his associate home with him and all five of us figured out the plan --Tacy’d come down because it was holiday time, she and Red were the ones who were almost sane, they figured it out with help from Dembe. It was like madness, like a dream world, where terrible things happen at a moment’s notice, but so do ridiculous, implausible solutions. Sometimes I think it worked as well as it did because the five of us willed it to. All of Red’s stories are like that too, full of things that shouldn’t be, only they are because he willed them to be so.”

“But Daisy was fine?” asked Liz, insistent, worried for the girl’s safety though she’d heard about her joyful, studious current life over lunch.

“She wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t alright for some time but she wasn’t hurt and she was 11, young enough to go back to being a kid for a while longer as she processed it,”said Astrid, “Red had never met her then, but he and Jonah were possessed of equal fury. Not one hair on her head would harmed or he would raze them to the ground. Raymond was hurt and Jonah was hurt but Daisy came home without a scratch. I don’t know what Raymond has over them, I don’t ever want to know, but he says there’s no danger now and I believe him. It’s been years and we’ve never even heard a whisper of more trouble. We brought Red and Dembe back to the big house in the aftermath to recover. He has a standing invitation to take shelter here if ever he needs, it was the least we could do, but he’s only shown up at the holidays. We know something bad happened to him this time of year, too.”

“You’ve got to admit, it’s a pretty place to wait out a difficult time of stretch,” put in Tacy.

“And you don’t hold it against Red, for trying to get your husband involved in dangerous counter-intelligence?”

“No, he didn’t get Jonah involved, and he was willing to do whatever it took for virtual strangers when Jonah went to him for help,” said Astrid with some vehemence, “As far as we’re concerned we’re his allies for life. Besides, some of our best paying regulars came here on his recommendation, it’s made it possible for us to keep this place comfortably. And anyway,” she continued shortly, “Jonah isn’t my husband anymore.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Liz hurried to apologize, feeling sure she’d stirred up far to many painful memories for these people, “I didn’t realize… I don’t mean to pry into all these personal things.”

“We split up a not quite two years after. He helped get her back but he felt so guilty over everything. I loved him, still love him but he was tearing himself apart and it was hurting Daisy to see her father in that state. I didn’t blame him for what happened, but I did blame him for not being able to move past it and he just couldn’t,” said Astrid and she busied herself by punching down the rising bread dough and bringing it out to knead, “I don’t mind talking about it. The telling of it helps you, I think. It’s the keeping everything secret that gets you in the end.” 

She sounded sad, but like it was an old hurt, something she’d made peace with. Liz wondered how you did that, made peace, moved on. All of her hurts has always stayed raw and aching.

“Still, I’m sorry,” she said, “That must have been very painful,” and then, persuaded by wine and traumas these women had shared with her, she said without thinking, “I recently lost my husband, too, so I can sort of understand. No, I mean, I didn’t lose him, he’s not dead, he didn’t exist to begin with. He was a lie, just a character he played because marrying me was a convenient ploy for his boss.”

“Oh, that’s terrible!”cried Tacy, coming to sit beside her in solidarity and topping up her glass.

Astrid turned away from her bread dough to face Liz, wiping her floury hands on her apron, wearing an explanation of true, pained sympathy. “I’m sorry. That must be very hard. I suppose it feels like he died and he tricked you all at the same time. Well… you’re among friends here, alright? And we won’t pry, will we, Tacy -- but if you want a sympathetic ear…” 

She froze, longing to tell it all, not just Tom and his long game with her, but how it all resonated so strangely, so well with her mother’s fate, the pain and joy of that discovery -- she had hardly paused to think but she knew her mother’s name was Julia now, and she never had before. As when she’d stood in the face of Meera’s mild friendly concern, she wanted to tell them all of it, from her strange beginnings to Tom’s insidious creeping as though it were all of a piece and she could not speak any of it without saying all. She could not say ‘My husband tricked me and controlled me and corralled my impulses because his employer thought to control me,’ without also saying, ‘It was all part of a pattern, I am part of the pattern my mother walked, my father killed my mother and it might have happened to me, I might have married the man who would kill me only Red showed up and shook everything apart and awoke me from my deadly stupor...’ But she couldn’t tell them all of it even though they would understand better than most and look down at her with their kind round faces and their solemn pale eyes and comfort her and feed her up with nice things. It wouldn’t be fair to them. They’d known danger enough in Red’s world already.

“I don’t even know if I could put it into words,” she said at last, feeling something in her crush and squeeze at putting off the longing to unfurl the tale and bleed off the charge, “It hasn’t even been a week since I was finally able to get away. Thank you, though, it’s nice to know that I _could_. But it’s nice not to think about it, too. And you’re right, this is a beautiful place to hide away.”

Tacy and Astrid made the appropriate noises of understanding and moved the conversation on to ask her if she’d like anything special for dessert. They were making stew for dinner, rich beef stew with red wine and mushrooms, with the fresh bread that Astrid was making, all of which would reheat well for the next night. Astrid and Tacy would be down with Daisy at the little house, having their little holiday, since Raymond had always wanted to spend the holiday alone.

“We always invite him but he never comes,” Tacy told her, “You’re more than welcome too, Liz, if you’d like.”

But she didn’t want to intrude, and she didn’t want to leave Raymond. Since he’d brought her here with him he must want her company and she wasn’t eager to be away from him for any length of time, not when they’d have plenty of restraint and distance by necessity when they were back in DC. And she didn’t want to go where there was a happy little family, with their tree and christmas dinner, and all the rest, not when she couldn’t even think of those things without missing her father so much it was hard to breathe. Sam had always had an unembarrassed joy in Christmas kitsch and holiday cheer and now, without him in the world, she couldn’t face it. 

She thanked them though, sincerely grateful that they’d welcomed her so easily and completely. She understood now that Red considered them family, bound to them by their trauma and their kindness and another child he’d helped to save. She could see clearly, too, that he could never have turned Daisy’s father away when she was taken and he’d begged for help, Red’s sense of honor and duty wouldn’t allow him to leave a child in danger but even more than that, the loss of his own daughter would have made the need to lend his aid even sharper. Especially when it seemed he’d played a role in creating the danger in the first place.

As she caught up with Red and asked after the report from Dembe in DC, she realized that he was just as much a figure of hope and salvation for those of his world as he was a figure of fearsome power and vengeance. She looked up into his familiar, beloved, beautiful face as he told her all was quiet back home, if not well, and realized she had had started by learning the worst of him, the very worst, and now she could delight in learning the best of him, and oh, just look how much of that there was.

He seemed puzzled by her sudden fond, watery smile but embraced her eagerly when she reached for him.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” she said, meaning, _thank you for trusting me, thank you for letting me know you_ , “It’s just what I needed.”

“Of course, Lizzy,” he said, pulling away but taking her hand, “I’m glad. It’s better this year, with you here.” 

**

She woke in the night without knowing why. It wasn’t a dream or a noise but a quietude, a blankness in the air around her. Raymond was gone and the space beside her was cool. She blinked around the room, which looked cold and cavernous in the moonlight and remembered again that it was Christmas Eve, the anniversary. 

She made a piteous sort of noise, knowing he was not there to hear it, a sob or a gasp or some strangled thing. It was such a conscious-making, leaden, unsettling sensation to be the life that was unwittingly exchanged for another life. Here she was alive and in love, by an absurd chain of consequences, when another girl very like she had been did not -- in all likelihood, did not -- live to see her seventh birthday. 

Seven was a good age, she thought, bikes with streamers and no training wheels, and dolls and horse posters and treasure-hunt birthday parties and orange soda and no homework. Seven was good. Seven was happy. She’d made it out, she’d gotten to keep counting up and up, she got a daddy who loved her, and cousins and an aunt, and Abigail hadn’t. Abigail stopped. And if she hadn’t, well. To think she’d stopped was perhaps kinder. 

She dressed quickly in her discarded sleep clothes -- though they’d done nothing more than lie together, skin to skin, needing comfort more than passion on this night -- and pulled the crisp, rustling eiderdown comforter around her as a great trailing robe against the chill. She needed to find him. Even if he’d slunk off to hoard his hurts in private, she could not let him pass this grim night watch alone. 

He wasn’t hard to find, where she’d found him the night before seemed to be a sign of a pattern. The doors from the library to the wide observation deck that wrapped around the seaward side of the mansion were closed tonight, but he was out there just the same. She didn’t see him at first, but she caught a faint whiff of cigarette smoke and heard a faint creak of movement and noticed there was a wide wooden porch swing tucked deep under the eaves several feet away from the door, where the view of the sea was best. And there he was, feet propped up on the low table in front of him, drink abandoned by his crossed ankles, ashtray beside him on the seat as he stared out at the crystal clear night, the very portrait of a gentleman at leisure made wrong by the defeated hunch of his posture, the late, frozen hour of the night. 

He was bundled up well this time, at least, she thought, though the sight of a cigarette in the hand of another person she loved made her chest twist all up with panic inside, after everything she’d been through with her dad. It was ridiculous, she told herself, he was an adult, he would make his own choices, it was a terrible anniversary, all of those were true, but even though she never worried about his chances in an armed confrontation, she knew too well how cancer didn’t care how brave and clever you are. Sam was brave and clever but look what it got him.

_I need you to stop that_ , she wanted to tell him, _I need you to live forever_ , but she couldn’t say that because all he would hear is _I already think you’re old_ , even though what she meant had nothing to with age and everything to do with the shock of finding he was someone she wanted in her life always, always, for as little or as long as that might be. It wasn’t the time, and anyway she had promised herself long ago not to find herself playing mother hen to any man.

She shuffled up to the big porch swing, slippered feet making little noise on the deck but her big comforter rustled and crinkled enough to announce her approach. She saw him glance in her direction and then back out at the dark bay view. 

“There you are,” she said, but with no real note of discovery, the obligatory opening salvo of any woman looking for the man who has wandered from her bed in the middle of the night falling from her mouth automatically but without any sense of urgency. Because of course she didn’t mean ‘ _there you are_ ,’ she meant ‘ _Here I am, for you, if you should need me_.’

“Here I am,” he mirrored, his voice dull and weary, and rough from cigarettes or tears. Or perhaps this was one of those hurts that was buried so deep and yet paradoxically distant that he could no longer cry over it. She knew those hurts and how they throbbed and would not be relieved or even brought out into the open air.

**

When Elizabeth had first reached out to him, had kissed him, offered herself to him, he had been dumbfounded and ecstatic, he felt as though he’d been offered something he’d never even dared hope for. But he’d pushed her away, said words that made devastation bloom over her face, needing to warn her about the many ways he could destroy her utterly, not knowing how she could profess her attraction so easily when she had to know he’d done many more terrible things than she knew about. She was too beautiful and glorious and good, too full of promise and cleverness to be drawn down, tainted by the likes of him. She was an innocent in this and he was not. She was young and he was not. She could still return to her life and live it to the full after this was over -- though perhaps only just for she was walking out so close to the point of no return now, and it terrified and thrilled him -- but his life, well. His life had passed that point of no return, and passed even that point where he still wished that he could, and passed them both long, long before he suspected she would figure in his life in any real way. 

He had always said she was his second chance, and perhaps she’d thought he meant that she was a second chance to loved or be saved, and it only proved the generous nature of her heart that she thought so. But he had hoped for nothing so impossible, only to be saved from the torments of his guilt. He’d wanted another chance to save the strong, wild, threatened young woman from her monstrous husband, and to see her live and thrive in time, where before he had abandoned Julia to her fate and attempted to return to living his life, like a cowardly knight derelicting his duty. He’d wanted another chance to keep saving the girl he had saved, in hopes that maybe this time he would feel his burden lightened, the weight of his own family’s bloody disappearance might be lifted from him just a little. He had never expected a true tabula rasa, only that the weight bearing down on his bones, that he must carry always up the mountain side might begin to ease. 

But Lizzie had always been a catalyst for change magnitudes beyond anything he could predict, and he hoped that he would be there to see that she always would be. She hadn’t turned away from him, she hadn’t given up, she’d demanded he state his feelings straight out, and he could never lie to her so he offered up his love and waited for her judgement in hope and fear. And she had frowned up at him in that all seeing way of hers and accepted his love and returned it, invited his touch, his embraces. 

He had begged forgiveness for his multitude of sins against her -- the ones she knew and the one she never could -- for his sins against the world with his lips brushing the warm, young skin of her cheek, against the soft perfumed silk of her hair. He sought absolution from her because her voice alone he might believe, she who knew him, who looked into his heart, had seen him violent and seen him kind. She had sensed his distress, though perhaps not understood the depth and breadth of its cause. She had comforted him and petted him and rocked him like he was a boy, with gentlest care, and he hadn’t felt so loved in all these many, endless years of ice. It had been so long, so very long, he'd forgotten what it was like to be cherished and held by someone who knew, someone he trusted. 

_It’s alright_ , she had told him, _We’ll look after each other_ , and he vowed right then that he would look after her like it was his only job for the rest of his life, if only he might feel again her soft, loving hands, the warmth of her concern, the fierce determination in the curve of her spine under his palms. He believed that night that the two of them might just make it through the treacherous way ahead somehow still whole and true, if they could do it holding each other up. This hope, more than the light of love that he had almost, almost grown accustomed to, was like a shock of something clear and bright and bracing, an excruciating clarity, a radiant uplifting.

He felt the course of a hundred different fates shift that night, the tiniest change like something aligning or coming to pieces in the back of his mind. And that small change would send out ripples into the dark, into the far distant future, for them later to encounter. The course of his will was changed, and the course of hers, and together that had an effect. It felt like a change in the weather, like a turning out of the wind. 

**

He had loved her straight away, though he admitted that he was already predisposed, already fond, of a much faded memory and the young woman in her father’s stories and of what she symbolized. He regretted later how blandly and selfishly and mistakenly he’d adored the symbolic vision of her. It seemed an insult to the real woman that she was.

Their first real meetings didn’t go how he envisioned, but that was better, that was more real. She was not a soft fantasy nor a patient, gentle idol or avatar, the sexless innocent he had pictured, who might come to care for him and tend to him, yes, but with cool, angelic consideration and a serene distance. 

It was her fury, her enraged defense of her husband that woke him, made him see her as a woman and not a symbol. The way she flew at him with what weapon was to hand to hurt him and make him obey. She was impulsive, she was sharp, she was loving and loyal. She made him bleed and then she asked him for help, she listened to his council about her traitor husband and did not immediately doubt it. She stared him down over drinks and summed him up easily, yet she didn’t dismiss him despite what she saw. She was a magnificent bundle of contradictions.

He paid attention to her after that, to the real details of her, not the hazy memory of a sullen girl-child and second hand anecdotes and pilfered instructor reviews. She was brilliant and naive, she was frightened into rigidity but she was kind. 

She was beautiful, more beautiful than he could believe. The line of her jaw, the colour of her eyes, her mobile face and her long slender neck and lovely sculpted collar bone, the way she frowned at him in concentration, the way she fidgeted with the burn mark on her wrist, the flash of dimpled grin he could startle out of her from time to time. The way her two front teeth were just the tiniest bit crooked, the way her glossy, dark hair tumbled about her shoulders, the way she could stride into danger with a firm spine and a sense of righteousness and find her way out of it again largely unscathed and not unsettled in her confidence. All of it was so wonderful sometimes he could hardly bear it. 

In truth, once he started paying attention, it was only days before he was irretrievably in love, even if it took him far longer to accept it in himself and admit how it must change all he’d planned. In truth, she was too sharp, too wild, too wonderful and despite his every intention, he was lost.

**

Sam had asked him for one very great, very last favour, and he had done it. Not least because he’d been the one to draw Sam peripherally into the same snare that had caught him. Mostly though, he’d done it because Sam had, in a long ago time, been an older brother to him in many ways, and and was still one of those very few close enough to him to know him. Sam had in fact been the only remaining person in his life who had known him before and cared for him still. So when Sam had asked him in the name of mercy to be granted something he’d forced on others in the name of vengeance and preservation he could not refuse, though it made his blood freeze and his heart suffocate in his chest. 

He hadn’t been in touch with Sam as often as he might, though they talked far more often after Lizzy had moved out East where her safety wouldn’t be as easily impinged upon by two old friends catching up. He’d known about the first round of cancer. He’d funnelled money, he’d researched and recommended doctors, he’d even put all his dealings aside for a time and gone out for a visit when he was sure he would miss Lizzy. 

Sam had been thin and sick and bald and perpetually cold from the treatment but it didn’t have him, it hadn’t beaten him, his spirit was strong. Sam had joked with him and told him about all the gossip from the old crew that he could still keep in touch with and Raymond couldn’t. They watched old movies and sipped powerfully strong ginger ales instead of beer. Raymond had realized he’d gone there, not to comfort a friend as he’d thought, but to be comforted himself, that his old brother in arms, with his endless good nature and his strange sense of humour would remain in the world for a long time yet. And Sam had been fine then, he’d been in remission for another few years, enough time for Raymond’s attention to wander to other things. 

But the call had come, on a quiet evening in October, and he’d known by Sam’s voice that there was something terribly wrong. He flew out that night in grim anticipation. He didn’t believe it, quite, until he got to the hospital and saw his old friend in that bed. 

He didn’t look as outwardly sick as he had those years and visits ago, not quite as deathly pale or thin. He still had the full head of grey hair that had grown in after the chemo, Sam had teased him that his at least had come back. Raymond could see it though, he knew death well, had walked that desolate snowy lane often enough on his own and with others. That mortal change had come upon Sam, he could no more deny it than he could describe it to one who had never seen it. 

He knew then, with a hot and cold rush up the back of his neck like fear, like the world narrowing around him another inevitable increment, that it was today, that Sam meant for it to be over today. That was why he’d called.

They talked all day, though Sam was short of breath, and drowsy at times. There were so many old times to talk about, from before, that other life when it had been him and Sam and Maggie and Sarah, and then little Abby when she had appeared on the scene. 

Sam told him he’d had a sick feeling about some of the missions long before Julia had come to him with her suspicions. That Sam still felt guilty that he hadn’t gone to him and convinced him to get out when he had.

“I didn’t want to poison it for you,” Sam said, “You were the favourite, you were going to go far. And I didn’t really _know_ anything, it was just a feeling. Or maybe I should have stayed, tried to do something about it.”

“You had Maggie,” Raymond assured him, “You did the right thing. I wouldn’t wish this life on you, my friend. Sometimes I think I should have had the sense to do just the same as you did.”

He told Sam how wonderful and strange it was to meet Elizabeth as a grown woman, what a miraculous bundle of contradictions she was. So bold, so furious, so loving and kind. 

“She doesn’t know what to make of me,” he said, at one point, not meeting Sam’s eyes, sick with guilt at the way he coveted his old friend’s daughter, adored her, though neither she nor Sam should ever know, “I alarm her, I think. As well I should, I suppose. Sensible of her. I am an alarming man after all.”

“I need you to know that she was the best thing, Ray. The best thing that ever happened, the best of me. You brought me that woman’s child and I had no idea what I was doing, and Maggie had no idea what she was doing. I know I took it out on you when Maggie left, and it was hard at first, but I want you to know you did me the biggest favour of my life by telling Julia she could trust me with Lizzy,” he said, terribly urgent, and then had to pause to breathe, winded and made limp with the exertion.

Raymond offered to get a nurse, get him hooked up on oxygen but Sam waved him off. Then he told Raymond what he wanted him to do.

“The next part of this cancer is misery, Ray. I watched my grandmother die this way when I was a boy, it was awful to watch. I watched it happen to my dad not long after Lizzy came to me,” Sam paused to breathe and looked out of the window at the beautiful autumn day instead of at Raymond, “I don’t want to be here for this next part, Ray, it’s pain and suffocation and shitting myself and it’s fading slowly out until there’s nothing left but the failing body. I’ve had all the tests they can give me and they all say the same thing, I’ve got a month, six weeks if I’m lucky, and those six weeks… I don’t want to make my daughter watch me die like that and I don’t want to watch myself die like that either. Not to mention the people who would love to know what I know when I’m too gone on morphine to know not to tell them. I need you to help me, Ray, you’re the only one I trust to do this for me.”

“God damn it, Sam,” he said, and for once in his life could find no other words. Even the space inside his mind was empty and ringing with shock and fear of living in a world without his oldest friend. He’d known from the moment he walked into the hospital room what Sam wanted but still, to hear it, to know, he was thunderstruck and grieving, recoiling in horror that his brother’s death would be on his hands, even if that death was a kindness.

“You haven’t gone squeamish on me, have you, old man?” said Sam, with something like gallows humour, but he coughed and sobered quickly, pinning Raymond with his frank gaze, “No, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry to do this to you. I wouldn’t even ask, but I need to be sure. I love you and I trust you and I need to be sure.” 

So Raymond agreed. He couldn’t refuse Sam, after everything, even though it would cost him. He wasn’t squeamish, he knew death well, it was just that he’d never thought to deal it here. He asked Sam if he would call Lizzy or see her, give her some warning of what was coming, let her say goodbye. 

“She doesn’t even know you’re sick,” he said, not quite scolding but picturing already how devastated she was soon to be, knowing how deep the wound ran when you turned to find your loved one suddenly gone, “I could bring her in my jet, it would be a matter of hours.”

“I talked to her this morning. She’s happy. She’s busy. She would ask me to stay and fight, and I would do it because she asked and she’s my daughter, but…” Sam shook his head and lay back against his pillows, already looking, paler, more distant, nearer death than even when Raymond had come that morning. He was grey and limp and his eyes seemed unfocused. Still, it was the thought of the people who might extract dangerous knowledge from Sam, who might put Lizzy in danger, who might appear and cause Sam unnecessary pain before he went that kept him from stalling, from drawing out all the time he could.

It was far easier than it should have been to procure a sufficient quantity of morphine to ease Sam’s passage, and even easier to inject it into his IV. Then he sat and held Sam’s hand as he began to drowse, to drift.

“Tell Judy I’m sorry I left the house such a mess. Tell her I’m sorry I left everything such a mess,” said Sam.

“She loves you, she’ll understand,” said Raymond, patting his hand.

“And tell Lizzy… I don’t know. She should know the truth. She always wanted to know, but I... I could never stand to tell her.”

“You’re her father, you always will be. That’s the truth that matters, Sam. But I’ll tell her, when I can. I promise you.”

“Don’t tell her this. I don’t want her to… if she… Tell her I stayed as long as I could, if she asks, but don’t tell her...” Sam said at last.

“No, she doesn’t need to know, I’ll keep your confidence, you have my word. And it’s true, isn’t it? You have stayed… as long as you could,” he agreed, and felt Sam’s hand relax in his, either from relief or from the drug taking hold.

“It’s a beautiful day,” said Sam, slowly, looking past him out the window, “I’m glad it’s such a beautiful day.”

Raymond nodded and couldn’t speak. _If you see Abby and Sarah where you’re going, tell them…_ he wanted to say to Sam, but his throat ached with some emotion that was more anger than sadness, though it was both, that this moment had come upon them so suddenly and so unmercifully. And he wasn’t sure that it was a place Sam would be going to at all, he was half sure that it wasn’t, not a place but a rest, as stopping, a final relief that he almost envied, and he wasn’t sure, not absolutely, that his girls would be there to greet Sam even if it was. 

He said nothing in the end, looked down at Sam’s lax hand instead and chafed it gently between his, and when he next looked up, Sam’s eyes were closed.

Once he was sure that Sam was deeply adrift, and past all sensation, he took the pillow. And when it was done, he smoothed Sam’s hair with care and hands that did not shake though he wished they would, kissed his forehead, and smoothed his covers. 

For as long as he dared, Raymond sat and kept guard while his friend’s body cooled and felt the lack of Sam’s presence in the room. Then he slipped out and no one noticed him, not even the nurses who kept watch at the ward desk, for he was always as good as invisible when he willed it so, even though he felt lost and ill and conspicuous.

Tom was there, at the hospital, without Lizzy, lurking and trying obviously to appear innocuous. Raymond saw him and sought him out and issued the sternest warning he could muster that would not lead to outright confrontation in public. He knew that Tom had arrived to do no good, and that that Sam’s sense of timing had been as true as his own.

He called Lizzy then, outside in the crisp afternoon air. He spoke to her gently, though he was insensible of what he said. She was distracted, she was dismissive, but she was healthy, focused, untouched still by the tragedy that was about to spring on her, and her voice was like a tether that helped him find his way back to earth, back to his body. He found that he couldn’t be the one to break the news to her, though that’s what he supposed he’d intended -- he couldn’t tell her without explaining how he knew and that was impossible. 

**

He couldn’t regret fulfilling his duty as Sam’s brother but it was another loss in Lizzy’s life and he’d facilitated it, and there were some moments, the moments where the grief was plain on her face, when he didn’t know how he could face her in her ignorance. 

For being there to take her father from her, and before that, for being the lure that drew Tom into her life, for being the presence lingering on the deepest periphery of her life offering protection while making her a target, carelessly risking that one good thing he had done -- for that he could never quite forgive himself. 

And when she reached for him in love and expectation, at first he had recoiled, stung as though burned by his own conscience. He was harnessed and bound by his guilt, it was his master and his engine as he made is way, and he bowed to it even in the face of his beautiful Elizabeth’s palpable longing and despair. 

But he soon realized that the confession of this deadly mercy would hurt her more than it would ease his own pains, especially as it was Sam’s will he’d done, and had been Sam’s to confess. She knew the greatest and the worst of his failings and follies, other than this, yet reached for him still. 

Hadn’t he always thought to abide by what judgement she rendered upon his character, whether it was her acceptance or her condemnation? Shouldn’t he at least try to trust her where he did not trust himself, didn’t she at least deserve that much respect after he had wronged her so long by making of her a fantasy creature, a depthless eidolon in his heart? 

He hoped that perhaps this once he could scorn his guilt and instead trust her as the better master, especially when to scorn her in it’s place would only add to her undeserved misery. He could surrender himself to her and hope, and it might almost be enough in itself, to embrace that feeling of possibility for as long as it might last.

**

He made room beside him on the deep-seated swing, putting out his cigarette end when she came near and made a face at the smell of it -- it was himself he meant to punish with the foul taste and sick-sweet buzz, after all and not her. She settled nearly on top of him, just the same, unfurling her white, rustling comforter so that it enveloped them both, though he had his coat and scarf and she had only her night things and slippers. She didn’t put her arms around him or lean her head against him the way he had expected her to do, perhaps uncertain of his mood or her welcome, but she pressed close and warm at his side.

He could think of nothing to say, caught between the intense privacy of his hurt, that was not hers, that he had always guarded selfishly, and the longing to somehow invite her comfort, her gentle hands cradling him, as though this might fix or ease something that his twenty three years of solitary observance had not. He could say something to provoke her and make her flee, he knew that, but the other, the other he’d never known how to elicit even as a young man. He had loved his strong, young, Sarah and she had loved him, he was sure that she had, but their marriage was one of youth and bravado and duty-bound distances, partings and reunions, and secret things too classified or too awful to share with his wife. He hadn’t learned how to be comforted in that life with Sarah, he hadn’t truly considered the possibility, he’d only learned how to keep his own council. And with others over the years. with those he had grown close to but never more than close, never more than fond, he hadn’t been moved to crave that kind of compassion or understanding.

With Lizzy, with his gracious Elizabeth, he wanted her to see and know, and for her to accept his burdens without feeling it her obligation to cheer him or fix him. It was a lot to ask of someone, even someone as surprising and complex as she.

She felt wonderful against him though, warm and sweet-smelling and carrying with her the lassitude of sleep like a radiating aura. She was human and earthbound, and the soft-breathing presence of her was as much a balm to him as anything she might say, he felt, the solidity of her guiding him back from the icy night road where he wandered. Still, he felt the touch of ice on him, and on this night especially, he still heard the pattering hush of snow falling on snow, a phantom sound echoing loud. He hoped she might inadvertently guide him forward into the world he shared with her, that she might banish for him these aged and awful spectres. 

“When I was a kid,” she began, as though they were merely having a conversation on any evening, not as though she’d come to find him in the middle of the night, “I used to love those stories about strange things that happened on the night before christmas, animals talking and strange visitations. Tricks to tell the future. There was something raw about those stories that seemed more real and more dangerous than Santa Clause and the Wise Men.”

He hummed a vague acknowledgement, not quite sure how to talk plainly about ordinary things in that moment. After a time he said, “Abby loved the _Tailor Of Gloucester_. That was a tale of christmas eve magic, but she wanted to hear it at bedtime all year round when she was five.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, sounding lost, perhaps pained on his behalf or perhaps, like most people who have suffered loss, she was shy of remembering that same pain in herself, “I don’t know what to say.”

“No reason why you should. It’s alright, I don’t know either,” he said, and slipped an arm around her at last. When she still didn’t seem near enough, he fumbled with the zip of his coat under the eiderdown and urged her to wriggle close, tucked her into it as much as he could. Her fingertips felt like burning hot spangles of warmth where they settled against his side, sending a shiver up his spine at the realization of his own cold.

“You never talk about them. Her,” she said, proving again that she didn’t shrink from that which hurt. Her voice was pitched soft and she didn’t talk to him but out into the bright full-moonlit night, “You don’t have to now, either, it’s alright, it’s just… It’s their night isn’t it. Theirs not ours.”

“Sometimes, on this night, I think they’re still out there, somewhere beyond this dark horizon, waiting for me to find them,” he said, and then made a noise of frustration, annoyed despite himself at the way Elizabeth stiffened against him, as though she’d like to express her pity or her disbelief. “No, I know they can’t be,” he said, his voice bristling with anger now, at the insurmountable years that separated him now from his young family, “If they were alive anywhere in the world I would have found them in these last twenty-three years. They’re gone. I know they’re gone. But there is a long snowy road in the woods... miles and miles it seemed, and I walked it thinking of a hero’s welcome and it turned out instead to be the road to hell. On this night I walk that road and I still expect to find them waiting, my dark, patient Sarah and my little, brilliant Abigail, looking out the front room window at my grandmother’s house, waiting to catch sight of me coming up the drive. On this one night, I let myself expect… But I’m not a deranged man, Lizzy, don’t worry, on every other night I let them rest in peace, and only labour on their behalf.”

“Maybe -- maybe they really are out there somewhere, maybe you might still…” she ventured, in a voice strangled and reedy with emotion, peering up at him with hope almost like a child’s, but she soon wilted again and sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said, which seemed more an apology for raising again that hope of reunion that would never come than condolence for his loss.

It’s nice of you to hope with me, he thought, but couldn’t say it, finding the sentiment too patronizing and maudlin. He reached for his drink instead.

“It’s absurd to still grieve so, after all this time,” he said brusquely, taut with the fury he didn’t always remember he possessed, the frustration that choked him on those very few times he’d tried to speak it and let it be expiated, “It’s not as though I was very good husband or a model father. I worked so hard, I kept so many secrets, I missed so much. Most of what I knew of my daughter were her bedtime stories and her ballet recitals. I didn’t pick her up from school every day, I didn’t know what she liked to have for lunch, I didn’t know the names of her friends. Sarah had to tell me what she wanted for Christmas that year because she was the one who helped Abby write her letter to Santa. I was doing everything wrong and wasting the little time I had and I didn’t even know it.”

“She was your baby,” said Elizabeth, with such a note of gentle chastisement that he couldn’t breathe or think around the shock of it, the kindness, “I know you now, Raymond, and your faults are various, but you couldn’t be a bad father if you tried. She was your baby and you loved her. Maybe you would have doted on her a little too much in time, but there wouldn’t have been any harm in that.”

“Maybe not bad,” he said when he could speak again, “But careless. Wasteful. Thoughtless enough to get them killed.”

Elizabeth pulled away from him suddenly, unseating his arms from around her and disturbing the cocoon of warm comforter around them so that droughts of freezing air wafted in, chilling him. She stared down at him with that startled, assessing frown that she wore so often around him. 

“Is that what you think?” she asked, almost a demand, almost a plea that he didn’t quite comprehend, “Is that what you really think? That’s it’s your fault? That you’ve done this thing to them?”

He stared up at her, she loomed slightly over him, the angles and curves of her lovely face cast in brilliant moonlight and dark, rendering her hard and inscrutable, her eyes dark and glittering. Her soft, sweet breath warmed his cheek, for all that she seemed now Artimisian and unreachable. Is that what he thought? He wasn’t sure what she was really asking, but he could think of nothing to reply but to agree that it was. 

“You’ve heard the whole, bloody, sordid tale, Lizzy. You might be the only living person in the world who's heard every part of it. I set off this chain of events, which involved you as much as me, you’ve lived through some of the consequences. You tell me where else I might lay the blame,” he told her at last, with icy certitude, but she shook her head.

“So now you nurse your guilt and your regret as much as you nurse your grief, because your ego tells you that you could destabilize the whole world and shoulder the blame. Well maybe you could, now, but not then,” she told him, sad and firm and holding his gaze with a fury, “You did not kill your family, and you could not have known to rush to save them. You trusted that the world was just, that the good guys outnumbered the bad, you tell me where the guilt is in that?”

“I knew what the world was, I had the proof right in front of me. I should have known,” he insisted. He’d lived with it, not she, he’d helped to steal a child, he’d stumbled his way through trying to bring down an alliance of great powers and instead of dealing a killing blow he’d dropped his sword so completely he’d been unable even to fall on it. He couldn’t even say now that everything he did was in service of that great quest, sometimes these days his motives were only his own comfort, or appeasing his own uneasiness -- or to act on Lizzy’s behalf, but that distraction he didn’t begrudge.

“Well, tough,” she countered, “You don’t get to shoulder the blame for this. You didn’t make this happen. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that before?”

“There haven’t been many who were even in a position to know,” he said, which was true enough, not willing to admit to her right then that his old benefactor, his own Abbe Faria incarnate had tried to warn him off guilt and vengeance many years back when Raymond was just beginning to build the man he was now. He couldn’t hear or accept what Walter had told him then, and he wasn’t sure that he could accept it any better now, though he could tell that Lizzie meant it completely, not just as platitudes for his comfort. 

He looked away from her, back out over the distant sea. He finished his scotch and settled back against the creaking wooden seat, too weary to argue and yet unwilling to be moved. What would be left of his life if it weren’t cemented upright with the burden of guilt. It was his score to settle and his burden to bear, and on this night of all nights, he could not put either of them off.

“You don’t believe me, do you,” she said, disappointed and still distant from him, and she sounded young again, no longer stern but weary. 

Rather than answer, he put aside his empty glass and drew her back down against his side. She resisted for a moment, but soon relaxed with a shiver and together they rearranged the comforter until it was tucked up high around her shoulders. It was not exactly a comfortable nest, with the thin upholstery on the great, slowly rocking swing, and their tumbled counterbalance of shoulders, elbows and hips, with his guilt and hers, and her grief and his, all pressed close and wedged together and drowsing slightly to pass the time.

“It is their night, after all” he said, after a long time of quiet, in a voice that was steady and calm, that came from a place in him that was past grief, or encompassed it somehow, kept it swaddled and secure and let it sleep. And then, beginning to run his fingers slowly through her hair, as he liked to do to sooth them both, and unused to feeling so uncertain of the woman in his arms, he asked, “Are we alright? Can you you forgive my clinging to my burdens and my ancient past?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. I know there’s no magic words for this, Red,” she said, her voice gone slow and rough with her half-doze, “Anyway, it’s alright. Nothing here to worry us.”

He recalled saying just the same thing to her a month or so back, when he’d come back to her from his filthy campaign and found her in terrible distress. It was just as absurd and just as true as it had been back then. Nothing was right but neither was anything wrong, neither was there danger or pain, neither did they have to wait out the darkest hours alone but they could sit vigil together and be comforted, and not fear what was to come. Nothing here to worry us, tonight. 

He sat, starkly awake yet half in dream, and she leaned against him, pliable and sleepy but wakeful and present, for a long silent while. As the moon began to set below the treeline and the silver burnish that had lighted the landscape faded all at once, leaving them in amorphous dark, he began to feel the cold more than the stinging import of the memorial they observed. He roused Lizzy and they stumbled inside, still half-swathed in generous white comforter, to the promise of easy warmth and soft bed and healthful rest, and behind them out in the dark, the endless, watchful night eased.


End file.
